Tag Archives: sonnet

Sonnet 19

by Thomas Davis

Where do the minutes that we cherished go?
Two little girls, small hands inside our hands
while four of us walk in a wonderland
of starting out, our faces, hearts aglow
with happiness unrecognized, the flow
of time suspended as its hourglass sands
erase the moment when our lives were grand.
What happens to the joys of long ago?

We never thought the love we two had made
would fly apart in anger, or be lost
to liver cells that turned, as renegades,
into a cancerous, dark, evil holocaust.
We never knew we’d face insidious shades
that leave us mourning all the times we’ve lost.

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Sonnet 18

by Thomas Davis

The doctor said what needed to be said.
We asked the questions that we had to ask.
Compassion lined the doctor’s careful mask.
She held him; he held her; the awful dread
we’d felt at seeing him so weak in bed
now turned into a nightmare, a formal masque
that left our darkest primal fears unmasked,
our sense of living shattered, left in shreds.

How long? he asked the doctor as he sighed.
The doctor said, two weeks, some hours, some days.
She bent her head into his lap and cried;
he sobbed, his mother cried; I fought the haze
unmanning me. What could we do? I tried

to think, but, looking at my son, was dazed.

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Sonnet 12

by Thomas Davis

Before we reached the bank two twelve year olds
were on the water in the good canoe.
Both Brand and I looked at our sons1, their coup
apparent as they grinned at us, both bold
enough to know that, ten feet out, they controlled
the moment even though the wind still blew
and rain was falling hard, the clouds a stew
of swirling turbulence and cold.

“Okay,” Brand said. Inside the inlet, calm
prevailed, but as we went into the lake
the waves were higher than our heads. The qualms
I’d had at seeing youngsters make their break
to manhood with a crazymad aplomb
unmanned me–as they left me in their wake.

1 Brand Windmiller and his son, Jesse, and Kevin.

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Sonnet 7

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.

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Sonnet 5

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.

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Cryptic Moon

A sonnet by Thomas Davis

The moon rose over Grand Mesa’s dark blue rim
dark red, a presence hanging ominously vast
above our heads, the hills around us, dim
from fading light, now eerie, light recast
into a land of shadows burned with burnished red
that made the piñon’s stillness bristle gloom
and rocks elongate as they shined and bled
across a landscape rising toward the moon.

We walked, hand clasped in hand, our love intense,
into the weirding light, our senses shocked
by how the day had disconcerted sense,
transmuted time, the spirit of the rocks.

We walked in silence as the red, red moon
compressed to gold, then silver, a cryptic rune.

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Genius: Mildred and Bill

by Thomas Davis

To Mildred Hart Shaw and Paul Pletka

A sherry in her hand, surrounded by
the books that filled the room from floor to ceiling,
she watched the young man, self-absorbed, apply
a tiny brush to lead-framed glass, a feeling
of richness emanating from a scene
of large-eared rabbits sitting in the snow
beside a gully, mountains rising white, pristine,
into a winter sky that almost glowed.

The glass had traveled west a hundred years ago
strapped in a wagon pulled by two huge horses.
“That’s good,” she said. “It has a Christmas glow.
No rivers, but it sets the rivers in their courses.”

“A Christmas door,” he said. “It’s here, but then
you’ll wipe it clean to make it just a door again.”

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