by Ethel Mortenson Davis
I have dropped
most moments
onto the darkened sand,
except for a few
that I have held in my hand—
like a small child
holds your hand—
too tightly.
There I go, in secret,
into the darkened cloak
of the Great Purple Hairstreak,
getting lost among
the bright blue and yellow jewels
at the outer edge
of her wings.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, Poetry
by Thomas Davis
9
I listen to the patterns of his talk,
not words, but how intelligence melds tight
into the rhythm, substance, breathing, walk
of who he is, our precious son, the light
we want to hold so awfully hard and tight
his brightness will survive for years and years.
But now his voice is weak. We face a plight
no parent wants, but every parent fears.
We sit beside his bed and hold back tears
and wonder why intelligence is not
enough, acknowledgement by all his peers,
his friendships, days of happiness are not
enough, not while I listen for his thoughts
expressed as rhythms in his too-soft talk.
10
Our girls, when young, while we were driving, clapped
their hands and sang a rhythm song, their voices
so beautiful we felt as if they’d wrapped
the two of us into a world where choices
flowed like a shining river to the sea,
our lives a rhythm graced by daughters’ song.
We had our cares, but we were really free
of troubles that can make life seem so wrong.
Now here, today, I hear my daughters clapping,
hands flying from their sides up to their palms,
and listen to our heartbeats snapping, snapping
across the years to help our hearts stay calm.
Inside this turbulence I’d love to see
our daughters like they are inside my memory.
Filed under Poetry, Thomas Davis
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
Oh,
how the white delirium
has set in me.
Memories ache in my throat.
Sweetness stains my mouth.
I cannot forget
your unfamiliar eyes
that cried out to me,
the end of us!
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, Poetry
by Thomas Davis
We drove to Mesa Verde as the San Juan’s rose
in morning sunlight green, majestic, soaring.
I’ve met this girl, he said. He rubbed his nose
as if he had a pounding headache starting.
But I don’t know, he said. I feel like smiling
whenever thoughts about her make my day.
She’s with another guy she’s basically supporting.
He sighs. Sometimes I think she’ll walk my way,
but then she hesitates, he says. I sway
as if I’m in a storm that generates
emotions strong enough to make me flay
myself as who I am deteriorates.
Love isn’t what it really ought to be,
he said. The flower should accept the bee.
Filed under Poetry, Thomas Davis
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
Written after hearing a Marine’s story
on British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) radio
The young marine tells his story.
In Falluja they struggled:
eye gouging
hair pulling
biting.
It would be a fight
to the finish.
The American noticed
the Iraqi was a very young man.
He could smell
the man’s breath,
taste his sweat,
feel the broken needle
in his shirt pocket.
The Marine wondered
why he had signed up.
He wasn’t prepared
to kill a man
with his bare hands.
Then the Iraqi bit
a chunk out of his hand.
The American reacted
with rage,
found his knife
in his pocket—
the same knife
he opened his ration bag with,
thrust it into the Iraqi
below his collar bone,
into the artery,
then pumped the man’s neck.
When life was almost out
of his eyes,
the Iraqi reached up
and gently touched
the American’s hair
and the side of his face.
originally published in I Sleep Between the Moons of New Mexico
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, Poetry
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
you
smell like
wild snow
or
of trees
that hug
the earth.
turn your head.
you can hear
the moss
cling to the sides
of trees
and the sun
make your hair
the color
of red honey.
not there.
leave that hill
unnoticed.
Filed under Ethel Mortenson Davis, Poetry
I look upon his face, eyes closed, skin yellow.
His mother sits beside him in a chair,
her waiting silent, the currents in the ebb-flow
of illness mestasizing love and care
against malignancy, confusion, breath
that pauses much too long, then raggedly
resumes to indicate expected death
is not yet now, will be, God, hopefully,
another moment on another day.
His head slides to the side. His mother takes
a pillow, puts it by his head, her way
of caring, loving in the moves she makes.
I look upon his face and almost see
how mothers are, for sons, eternity.
Filed under Poetry, Thomas Davis
by Ethel Mortenson Davis
Dragging on the valley floor,
moist drapes of clouds
spread open a window
to the sacred mountain—
white ermine across her shoulders.
Complete, at last!
by Thomas Davis
The unemployment rate during this time of the Great Recession is haltingly going downward. It is acting like a rusted pair of gears that have been unused for years, but now someone has decided to make them do their old work again. They turn, but so slowly they barely seem to move. A little oil might help the economy’s gears, but that, coagulated in the veins of political discourse, seems to be in short supply. Republicans are into magical thinking: Motivate the rich, and they will invest the new money they get, even though they are not investing the piles they have piled up now, and the gears will not be only oiled, but greased. They seem to be incapable of understanding that money is not the central reason for living and therefore not the Great Motivator they would make it seem.
Of course, maybe they have not learned what Midas learned. If all you care about is gold you run the risk of turning into a Midas-shaped gold bar. Maybe they are so tuned into the vibrations of the wealthy’s economic machinery that they have forgotten to feel how sharp wind is as snow pelts out of the dark skies of early morning. Maybe they can no longer see the beauty in a mountain chickadee braving the storm for the last seeds left in bird feeders in the pinyon tree outside the kitchen window. Eyes made of gold have trouble seeing out of their golden pupils.
The Democrats are a little better. They seem to understand that when people buy and use the goods and services of commerce, the gears work a little better, but they seem caught in a spider’s web of Republican actions and words and their own dreams of golden sunrises pouring lucre in their pockets from the Great Wealthy. Even Obama, who I once thought was the Great Hope, does not seem to be able to maneuver even modest amounts of oil onto the gears. You can sense he is trying when the great Golden Powers That Be are not yanking his chain toward the magical thinking they espouse, but the gears are moving slowly.
As I sit my cluttered home office in Continental Divide, New Mexico touching my keyboard’s keys, I am haunted by so many things I can hardly visualize them. They flit in and out of existence as if thoughts are more miasma than words.
If I am motivated by anything, it is poetry: The words, thoughts, visualization of a graceful pinyon growing out of a crack in a sandstone slope so steep it is almost a cliff, ideas, symbols and metaphors echoing back into the history of human writing and thought, deepness of my love for Ethel, my wife for going-on 44 years. To sit down and write a sonnet is a joy that has always, even in grief’s entrails, made life worth living. But, of course, poetry is not enough. Not really.
Family, wives, sons, daughters, granddaughters, grandsons, all the relationships that make us who we are as humans, is more important than poetry, or the words that sound endlessly in our human heads, or anything else that comes solely from ourselves. Neither our selves nor those who make up our relationships will last forever, but while we are here, flailing about in the noise and contemporary world’s tumult, they provide a place where joy and happiness can exist. The people in the family have to be strong and gentle in their relationship to you and each other. Love true and generous can lift you past the humdrum of everyday while living through the everyday, but a good family and good relationships are much more important than even poetry, though God knows I love poetry and sometimes (if they are not too full of themselves and what they do) poets.
But inside these goodnesses is the canker of how to make a living, how to be part of the middle class always striving to make ends meet and go out on the town by buying a meal at a restaurant. Poets can starve. That’s the poet’s old image. Families can struggle. Relationships always take work and struggle. But if a nation has a purpose, its purpose is to take care of its people, to make both poetry and family possible in a way that does not force poets to starve and struggle does not wholly define and mar relationships in a family.
The Great Recession is not a blessing for either poetry or families or much of anything else. Ethel and I have been lucky. As an educator, working hard to make the future better for students and the Navajo Nation, I have been joyfully employed during this difficult time. But my students and their families are struggling even more than they struggled with poverty during better economic times, and as the middle class my parents struggled so hard to find their way into thrashes like a blind, caught beast in the trap it finds itself in, feeling like it is dying a slow death if not actually dying that death, I despair. What is going on? What is the answer?
Is technology the culprit underlying the foolish and miasmic words and actions of the political elite? Does it eat jobs as if they are a great crocodile’s prey, threatening the livelihoods people all over the world need in order to have the chance to live good lives? I have embraced technology and the future it promises all my life, but maybe I was wrong. Will innovation, the panacea offered by political speeches and my instincts, truly be the savior? Does one profession really die only to be replaced by another that spins human society on down the road to an improving future?
Has education, the deepest of my passions after poetry and family, become obsolete?
I reject that notion with every fiber in who I am, but I also know that a teacher, trying to teach with thirty-five students anything in a classroom, is just a talking head, and all over the nation Governors of the Great State Of are forcing more and more students into classrooms that cannot effectively act as places where learning can occur. Accountability! the pundits cry out. Accountability! All the while saying you can’t throw good money at problems. You have to solve the problem, forgetting that once this country had the greatest education system and greatest economy that ever existed until their wisdom started tinkering with it. The day Accountability! became the mantra and Those Who Raised Themselves By Their Bootstraps after inheriting their Daddy’s money began wanting the education system to increase their personal wealth by training students in a way that took the burden of training workers off them and their business, the performance of public schools began spiraling downward. Charter schools, tax breaks for property owners, especially for the elderly (meaning, of course, for the guy who owned the factory in the center of town and the rich Cadillac dealer on the corner), databased outcomes, and testing, testing, testing! followed the creation of an issue that has now become a crisis. The education system is broken, they say. Teachers are freeloaders living off the fat cats’ largesse that they have to give out in taxes their tax breaks fail to save them from, and it is wrong.
In the end Midas had no regrets. He was a golden statue looking out with sightless eyes at the universe’s beauty around him. Hopefully the Occupy and 99% movement, flaring in cities around the world, will wake up politicians and get them to provide at least a little grease for the economy’s rusted gears. May God grant that there is still room in the universe for poetry and families that have a chance of living the American dream inside a cocoon of the middle class. May the Education Reform movement choke on its numbers so that teachers can teach again and awake the genius of innovation and art in our wonderful children. May poets and teachers both celebrate the honors that they deserve.
And, as I move into the twilight of my life, may I be at peace, believing that the arrow of time is not carrying us toward a dead statue standing in a pool of greed that shines as golden as an indifferent sun.
Filed under Essays
by Alazanto
The moonlight:
bloody and scathed,
yet still intimate with a surreptitious fog,
crawls under the roots of November oaks.
The crows:
Forms shifting,
aspirations tuned to the leaves,
plot their conquest of riches untold.
I lean against an old light post:
Its tenuous figure leads my gaze toward a languid archway.
Dim shadows can’t stop whispering
as they congregate among misplaced bricks.
I want to talk to them,
but they scuttle away (in fear?),
spreading their wings atop higher estates.
As the streets, so tranquil, succumb to the fog,
the crows burst into chatter,
the oaks slip into laughter,
and the shadows, now mute, carry themselves into flight.
Anger pierces through the thick, grey and encroaching,
dragging along what mooning remains.
The archway awakens with unease.
My footings lost, I fall through its twilit bosom,
only to find you, my love,
at sea in a serene slumber.
That which haunts us shall set aside a bearing
of touch (to awaken),
so gentle of knowing,
that it may resound
in a moon
finally restored.
Note: There are a couple of versions of this poem. This version was on our home laptop. It is shorter than the other versions, and I like it the best. I believe Kevin put it on the laptop during one of his visits to New Mexico since I do not remember doing so.
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