by Ethel Mortenson Davis
Perhaps,
if we didn’t want
to go to a better place—
they said when he died
he went to a better place—
we would want to take care
of the earth
and other species.
Perhaps,
if we thought
of the earth
as our better place,
we would revere it–
the forest and animals
would be our cathedral.
This morning
the cornered possum
lay down and played dead
until the children and dog left.
Then she got up and ran away,
returning to her cherished life,
her better place.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, Poetry
by Thomas Davis
I dance in the Age of Information.
Like a crowd of people
Information floods over me,
Voices speaking, feet walking,
Demands crescending into emptiness
That wires constrictions around
Blue veined, throbbing heart.
You’re not too deep, you’re not too deep.
The voices sing in cacophony of meaning/
Meaninglessness.
You’re not up to the Age that is.
I walk into a pool of quiet.
An old man, dark eyes pooling
With sunfire of stars,
Flaring with emptiness between stars,
His skin the color of Nebraska soils,
Stares at me,
Then smiles.
Filed under Poetry, Thomas Davis
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
Unearthly stillness,
except for the sound of water
running in rivulets
down the face of cliffs
to the Great lake.
That is earthly.
Sandhill cranes
landing
as if on skirts of air,
suspended in mid-air,
slowly coming down
to start their spring dance:
Unearthly.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, Poetry
by Thomas Davis
A Spenserian Sonnet
Hunched down beside a woodpile, ebony,
In shadows from the cedars overhead,
The raven blinked black eyes, its dishabille
Of feathers rustling, stirring up a dread
So dark it seemed as if it called up from the dead
White wisps of spirits buried in the snow.
The raven hopped on top the woodpile, head
Cocked, moving like a dancer in a show,
A shadows’ shadow pantomiming woe.
Dawn’s darkness deepened as the raven leaped
Into the sky and hovered as the glow
Of blood-light saturated earth and seeped
Into the raven’s eyes, it’s dance undone
Until its beak croaked out the blazing sun.
Filed under Poetry, Thomas Davis
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
They were both
hanging by threads,
trying to hold together,
exhausted,
talking to people:
Lost yet another child–
But those threads
will widen,
grow strong
when they decide to live
again,
for the living–
like the herd of deer at dusk
we saw
when we drove
back across the white frozen fields
in a clearing,
on the side of a steep hill,
clinging to threads
in a trampled field
surrounded by deep winter snows.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, Poetry
A Droighneach by Thomas Davis
Crazed, the old man fled frightened from the house, unsettled
By spirit’s substance bled by the luminescence
Of energy, jangling jags nettled and re-nettled,
Made garish by the city’s flickering fluorescence.
Furious, he’d run to the dock, waters turbulent
On wet rock, his son’s stinging words echoing
Inside his head. He shoved his drumming discontent
Into a raging rhythm fed into his paddling.
Piercing into the moonlit island’s illumination,
Ancestral roots, rising from memories,
Deracinated, raging blood sparking rumination
Unlocked from a childhood’s flood of fantasies
Fulminating feelings long forgotten,
But still a song inside his consciousness.
He heard a singing unlike the jangling begotten
Of tangling time racing through his need to decompress.
Deciding suddenly, spirit wild, ascendant,
The child inside inspired, the old man, elated,
Grabbed his hand-held drum, descendants
Alive inside the meld decision’s dream created.
Climbing craggy cliffs where dark pines cling silhouettes
Against moon-silvered sky, spring serenading
Night as fields sigh slender, long-grass pirouettes
Beneath a breeze’s arc of shadow-waves cascading,
Carefree, careful, the old man seeks an overhang
Where cedars circle a coal-dark pool reflective
Of sky, human spirit whole, a boomerang
Fastening the eye on an earlier-earth perspective.
Palpitating lightning pulsed eeriness.
Above the old man moonlight convulsed, uncanny,
Until the sky-fire’s fury began to evanesce
Into circled cedars, dark-pool waters unearthly.
Unmanned, heart hammering, he stared at the intersperse
Of emptiness between stars, his son’s voice gravelling
In silence, “Stupid old man, your useless universe
Is cold dead bizarre,” he’d said. “Clueless! Repelling!”
Re-singing songs inside his head, immensity
In his breath, he stutter-stepped into a cataract
Of movement, dancing wildly, whirling festivity
Around the pool as he tried to counteract
Cacophony jangling madness, mauling senselessness
Into a waning world of troubled turbulence
As stars shining on the pool began to effloresce,
Out of his desperate dance, recovering providence.
Note:
A Droighneach is an ancient Irish, or Celtic, form of poetry. It is not commonly used by contemporary poets, although both Gerald Manley Hopkins, through his experiments with sprung rhythm, and Dylan Thomas, a bit more obscurely, modified old Celtic forms for their own purposes. This poem came about when Cynthia Jobin, an American poet who blogs at littleoldladywho.net, discovered that Nick Moore (gonecyclingagain.com) and I were challenging each other to write Spenserian and Italian sonnets rather than our usual work with the Shakespearean rhyme forms. Cynthia’s response was, “Say….I have an idea. Let’s all try to write a DROIGHNEACH …..(.Just kidding.I haven’t life enough, or time…..).” On St. Patrick’s Day I started what turned into an agonizing struggle to write a Droighneach. In the meantime Ina Shroders-Zeeders, a poet and writer from the Netherlands (inaweblogisback.wordpress.com), produced one in response to the conversation between Cynthia and I, which triggered Cynthia to write a traditional praise Droighneach to Ina’s effort.
Filed under Poetry, Thomas Davis
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
In the cold winters
around the Great Lakes,
ice moves
in constant, fluid motion
making cracking sounds,
thundering sounds
as ice heaves against ice,
shelf against shelf,
sending echoes out,
across a cold, stiff night,
that sound like a war
being waged,
like someone shooting off cannons
in some distant place.
She is telling us
she is still here;
she is still alive!
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, Poetry
by Thomas Davis
An Italian, or Petrarchian, Sonnet
All week green waves had groaned and cracked great chunks
Of gleaming ice onto the bay’s curved shore.
Then waves of geese, wings arched, began to pour
Onto the shining lake—small, gabbling monks
Dark-cowled in heaven’s shining, winding trunks
Of bodies stirred by Spring’s esprit de corps
As gabble after gabble, more and more,
Became a mass as open waters shrunk.
A V of snow geese, white with sun-drunk wings,
Swooped down upon the lake. The darkness stirred,
A whirling vortex wild, as honking cries
Become a water spout so large it flings
The lake into a shadow, waters blurred
By roiling, whirring-dark, goose-rising skies.
Note: Nick Moore and I have been attempting different sonnet types the last few postings. I dedicated the first sestina I wrote to both Nick and John Stevens, two poets who gave me the courage to try to write one. I then followed that up with the insanity of a double sestina, “The Time of the Poetic Spirit’s Splitting,” a poem I am still pleased that I wrote. Nick then wrote his own double sestina about cycling, one of his passions, that is better than Algernon Charles Swinburne’s “The Complaint of Lisa,” the first double sestina ever written by one of the great poets in history. All of this, along with a lot of other really good poetry, can be found on his gonecyclingagain.com blog. There are a few wordpress poets who have influenced me over the years. Nick Moore is certainly one of the most important of those poets. He has published his Italian sonnet in response to our current sonnet-writing effort on his blog, along with his Spenserian sonnet. He, like I, have long written Shakespearean sonnets. Ina Schroders-Zeeders at inaweblogisback.wordpress.com has joined us in our sonnet writing challenge.
Filed under Poetry, Thomas Davis
a Spenserian sonnet by Thomas Davis
Albino does emerge from banks of snow
Into the moonlight of the winter night.
The sheen of silver from the ghostly glow
Of luminance stained from the full moon’s light
Spreads through the shadows where the snow’s soft white
Moves with the movement of the silent deer.
The maple trees begin to stir, a slight
Breath silent through a sky pristinely clear.
A huge tree cracks. A wave of startled fear
Jerks through the deer. A wind begins
To blow through barking trees, the atmosphere
Alive with movement as the moonlight spins
Light dancing through an empty field that flows
With running waves of ghostly silver does.
Filed under Poetry, Thomas Davis
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
It’s where the snow lies
inside the beating heart;
the forest,
who speaks in voices
across the wind,
waiting for the conductor
to begin
its movement springward:
Where teeth tear open
the flesh of a kill,
wolfing it down in mouthfuls
before another comes
to claim it as its own—
Where mankind
has nailed her hindquarters
to a board.
In her anguish
and suffering
the forest
still presents us
with gifts
indescribable.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, Poetry
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