Carol V. Davis
Carol V. Davis is the author of Below Zero, Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2023, Because I Cannot Leave This Body (Truman State Univ. Press, 2017) and Between Storms (TSUP, 2012). She won the 2007 T.S. Eliot Prize for Into the Arms of Pushkin: Poems of St. Petersburg. Her poetry has been read on National Public Radio, the Library of Congress and Radio Russia. Twice a Fulbright scholar in Russia, she taught in Siberia, winter 2018 and teaches at Santa Monica College, California and Antioch Univ. Los Angeles. She was awarded a Fulbright Specialist grant for Siberia in 2020, postponed because of Covid restrictions and now cancelled. Poems have recently been used in performance by Donna Sternberg and Dancers.
In Every Generation
After a much-needed rain,
the trees drip long strands of water
like the bead curtain that hung
across my daughter’s door
to warn her I was approaching.
We hoped the storm would
break the cycle as we enter
the 5th or is it 7th year of drought?
This season, as war rages, I wonder
if I will ever get back to Russia,
never mind the grant to teach
in Siberia this very month.
Friends I hear from say little.
What does their silence mean?
I worry about emails
winging their way back and forth.
Are they too in danger?
Tonight, retelling the story of
the exodus from Egypt.
In every generation a Pharoah.
