Tag Archives: sonnet

April 21, 2012 · 9:10 am

Shining Waters and Sonnet 44

photograph by Sonja Bingen

This photograph was taken after the memorial for Kevin Michael Davis, organized by Sonja and Mary Wood, our daughters, was held at Newport Beach on the tip of Door County in Wisconsin, one of Kevin’s favorite places when he was a child and young adult. This beautiful place looks out on Lake Michigan and is filled with the sounds of birds and lapping of waves on sand and wet, black stones. Passing ships are often small dots on the distant horizon.

Sonnet 44

by Thomas Davis

To sum an individual life with words
is like endeavoring to touch a hand
through shadows on a wall. Like falling sand
words flow around our substance; sounds unheard
dance symphonies of brilliant mockingbirds
into an absence; moments fade into a fairyland.

Our son was loved; he loved; he made a mark
in web design, fought deep depression, wrote
some poems and essays, loved to walk the dark,
taught everyone around him, wore a coat
of many-colors from the spirit of his heart,
and blessed his father, mother as he taught

us courage as he faced life torn apart.
His death left us bereft, alone, distraught.

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April 14, 2012 · 7:56 am

Sonnet 43

by Thomas Davis

Grief leaps from cracks and corners, as I walk
or sit beside our window looking out
toward the mountains, like a fierce-eyed hawk
that slashes from the sky and grabs a trout
that flips and struggles as sharp talons snuff
light out of day, the beating from the heart.

Grief seizes life grown wearisome and tough
beyond all hope that might one day jumpstart
time’s stream and let the sunlight filter down
into the shadows, wakening the joys
that often went unnoticed as I walked on ground
made blessed by my wife, girls, precious boy.

The gray miasma leaps from corners, cracks.
I startle as the sun turns dark, then black.

Note: There are two more sonnets in the sequence I have been posting for months now. Most of the sonnets were written while Ethel’s and my son, Kevin Michael Davis, was in the hospital or at home under hospice care. These last sonnets were written shortly after his death a little over a year ago.

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April 3, 2012 · 7:33 am

Sonnet 42

by Thomas Davis

Back in New Mexico the monsoon rains
had turned the desert green. Massed sunflowers blazed
with purple bee balm in the fields, the stain
of colors so intense there was a praise
of living in the vibrancy exploding
across a landscape barren, dry, the earth
so sterile that the thought of burgeoning
into a garden seemed a cause for mirth.
We walked in beauty like the Navajo
and thought about our son and how his eyes
would never look again into the glow
of fields of flowers, see the flight of butterflies.

The moment that that thought occurred to me,
I stopped. How can this be reality?

Note: This was written just days after our son’s death in Poughkeepsie, New York.

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March 18, 2012 · 6:48 am

Sonnet 40

by Thomas Davis

The doctor, looking down at him, her voice
as soft as early springtime rains: “I hate
how cancer takes a person, steals their choice,
and makes inevitable their certain fate.”
She paused, a stranger. Then she shook her head.
“He was extraordinary. You can tell.”
She gently touched his clutched-tight hand, the bed…

“He asks the nurses how they are. The hell
he’s going through, he wants to know if they’re okay.”
She sighs and looks at Ethel, then at me.
“This ward is tough. Old cancer never plays,
but does his business, never lets us plea

for mercy.” Silence. “Fighting him is hard.
He leaves us memories, our lives in shards.”

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March 8, 2012 · 6:31 am

Sonnet 38, Kevin Michael Davis, February 16, 1982 – July 23, 2010

by Thomas Davis

He died enveloped in his mother’s arms.
The two of them alone, she felt so tired
from lack of sleep, she thought about the charm
of closing eyes and drifting off, transpired
into a dream where waiting, dread, and love
were not commingled with each ragged breath
he took. But then his breathing changed. She shoved
herself out of her chair and smelled his death.
She put her arms around him as his eyes
flew open, glancing one last time at light,
and then his breathing stopped. The cloudy skies
leaked rain. Eyes stared without the gift of sight.

Her daughter said, she brought him to the earth,
her love the bridge between his death and birth.

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February 19, 2012 · 7:28 am

Sonnet 37

To Sonja, Mary, and Kevin

by Thomas Davis

The genius in our children blesses us,
their energy in teaching, art, and poetry
transforming who we are, their lives a trust
born from the hymn of life, the sea
of possibilities, and trails that free
the spirit, leading to a forest made of light
that livens thoughts into a garden fantasy
of flowers blooming selves for our delight
at breathing who we are, the fahrenheit
of humans seeking out the truth of dreams.
Our children are our lives, a vein so bright
inside our spirits that their independence gleams
a pathway as we walk past all the streams

that act as barriers against the life we’d lead
if living stopped producing endless needs.

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January 10, 2012 · 6:19 am

Sonnet 32

by Thomas Davis

They came to see him as his body failed,
the morphine shredding boundaries between
the world we know and dream worlds where the seam
of time and substance is at last unveiled
and all the phantoms that have ever sailed
into our consciousness become a stream
of concrete beings shed of cloaking dreams,
the boundaries that held them prisoners curtailed.
He asked us if we saw them in the room.
We didn’t look, but looked at him instead,
resisting how we felt inside the gloom
that haunted us inside our haunted heads.

When, at long last, he spent his days asleep,
his spirit was the one we wished to keep.

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December 28, 2011 · 6:47 am

Sonnet 16

by Thomas Davis

He found the Internet; a shaman chanted
along connections in his nervous system.
Computer screens became a world enchanted
with who he was, his universal wisdom.
He wove design into the mysticism
of art enabled by an engineering
that danced like sunlight in a crystal prism
that set the mythos of our spirits soaring.
He took us on a visual journeying
as life fizzed, popped inside an endless mind
that questioned, questioned, focused on creating
a self that, like his art, swirled, scintillated, shined.

There’s courage in a heart that finds a place
to sing a hymn of individual grace.

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December 19, 2011 · 7:13 am

Sonnet 31

by Thomas Davis

Outside winds howled with snow and bitter cold.
The phone rang: “Mrs. Davis?” asked a girl.
She sounded frightened. “Yes?” Her voice controlled,
too soft, the girl said, “Kevin…” Strong emotions swirled
into the howling of the storm, the cold, the snow.
“I’m scared,” she said at last. His mother caught her breath.
He’s hours away, she thought. It’s twenty-five below.
The roads are ice. This is a night for death.
“I’ll wait here with him, but you have to come.”
No cars were on the road that late at night.
She crawled across the miles, the constant drum
of howling winds accentuating fright

that made her fierce when, shaken, stunned,
she put her arms around her struggling son.

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December 1, 2011 · 6:41 pm

Sonnet 21

by Thomas Davis

She’d showed him Vassar on his first day there.
That evening, going home, she saw him walking
a street so bleak he should have been aware
no stranger should be nonchalantly hiking.
She stopped her car, rolled down the window, frowning,
and asked him if he knew where he was at.
He laughed and said that he was lost, eyes sparkling,
“but I’ll be fine.” He was an alley cat.

She shook her head, but watched him walk and chat
about the universe, his mind engaged,
his deep-song spirit like an acrobat
that dares to fly upon Creation’s stage.

And somehow, starting from a place apart,
He/she flamed bright inside each other’s hearts.

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