Author: Beth Weaver-Kreider

Seeking Mystery

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The Mysteries of Mary Magdalene, painted by Andrea Solario, Piero do Cosimo, Domenico Fetti

I have been pondering the first and last lines of my Magician poem all day, and thought I might try to make something patterned and structured and rhymed, but the day has gotten away from me, and free verse is easier for the riff. It means that I do not often try my hand at more challenging forms during April and November, because I am caught up in the dailiness of school and grading. I’ll have to give myself some formal poem assignments for the summer.

Listen to the wisdom of the sage.
“What is language, but a kind of magic?
Here am I, in my own organism, my tower of Self,
and you there in your own lonely keep,
and how shall we bridge the gap between us
but by language? These webs of sound
we string together, we cast them through sky,
drawing out threads of meaning,
as with a wand, fiery threads of sense.

“We build this bridge on air,
scratch symbols on a page with feathers,
and stories flow like water between us,
borne on gossamer strands
of word on word on word.
We manage and tend our loneliness
by weaving cloths of language.
How can we find each other in the shadow
but for the flow of speech we offer
and the magic of these words upon the page?

TOMORROW’S PROMPT (April 4):
Today the Fool met the Magician, a mentor who taught her something of the nature of illusion and magic, of her power to work with the elements of earth and air and water and fire. Tomorrow, she will meet another mentor: The High Priestess, who will invite her to learn of the Mysteries. Perhaps this is Mary Magdalene, contemplating the skull, or offering the grail, or reading her book. The priestess is the keeper of the doorway of the most sacred of the mysteries, and so she is a challenger as well as a mentor. The Fool must prove herself before she enters the realm of the priestess. Tomorrow’s poem will be about Mystery.

Gratitude List:
1. Refried Beans. Such a basic comfort food. Add salsa, hot sauce, and a little sour cream, and it’s a delightful bean porridge for a chilly night.
2. Feedback. Sometimes it just nice to know what other people think. Not to validate, but to get a sense of whether people perceive me as I perceive myself.
3. Thoughtful guidelines for living more deliberately and authentically with our technology. That was a good chapel this morning.
4. How language links us.
5. Seeking wonder and awe. Preserving the mystery.

May we walk in Beauty!

Meeting the Mage

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Into the Woods

Sometimes you can’t see the trees for the forest.
You miss the sweep of oak, the broad arms of maple,
the proud rise of locust and poplar and pine,
because the understory closes in around you.
The briars catch and grab, the poison twists
and wanders everywhere into your pathway.

Sometimes you miss the healing tang of rose hips
there in the green tangle before you
because you’re fretting about the thorns,
licking the blood from torn and tattered fingers.
You miss the berries swelling in the brambles
as you reach to free yourself from their grasp.

But some days, when the path is muddy
and you’ve slipped for the thousandth time
back down the slippery hill trail,
your eyes will catch the bright blue
of a feather in wet leaves,
or the sparkle of a shining stone
there where your hand has reached
to push you back to your feet.

TOMORROW’S PROMPT:
Little Red had her Wolf, Snow White had her Dwarfs, and Goldilocks had her family of Bears. When the Fool enters the Wood, the first person she encounters is the Magician (the Mage, the Shaman, the Adept, the Witch). This is someone with a great deal of skill in the manipulation of the elements, someone who can make you see what you think you want to see, a creator of illusion. The Fool encounters Magic in tomorrow’s poem. My poem will be about Magic or the Magician, or the Elements, or changing consciousness at will. Will you join me?

Gratitude List:
1. Getting it done. Plugging. Deciding what I can do and can’t do, and making it work.
2. The haven of my parents’ house for grading in silence, distraction-free.
3. Music and words. Reflection and contemplation.
4. Black-out poetry–my sixth-grader is doing some for homework, and it’s lovely.
5. All the elements.

May we walk in Beauty!

The Way of the Fool

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Ah, yes. Here on the first day of April, I spent the day with eight-year-olds, and am soon off to another birthday celebration with Grandma. Ah, the life of the Fool–planning it ALL in there, even if it seems impossible.

Begin your road at the ending,
as the last pathway rounds the bend.
Dance to the lip of the chasm–
place your foot upon a bridge of rainbow.
Keep your eyes upon the distant wood,
your ears tuned to the song of undine and dryad.

Remember, your road is a circle,
and everywhere you are is the start of your journey.
Your road is of water, of vision, of air,
of heartbeat, illusion, and wisdom
a pathway of fire and smoke.

Feel how the sky under your feet holds you up,
how the earth at your back is made only of dreams,
how the only way forward is light and color,
how a distant harping draws you onward.

Tomorrow’s Prompt: Let’s just keep going down the Fool’s Road, shall we? After she embarks on her Rainbow Road, the Fool enters the Enchanted Wood, where she meets a complex cast of characters, meets a variety of challenges, and develops her skills and knowledge. Today, let’s take her Into The Woods. Take a fairy tale turn or a psychological turn. Be whimsical or wise–or both: that’s the Fool for you.  My April 2 poem goes Into The Woods.

Gratitude List:
1. The world of the Fool. Stepping off the edge of the chasm into the void. Trusting the bridge.
2. The energy of eight-year-olds. Fun, playful, eager.
3. Moss and ferns in the woods. Green, green moss.
4. The play of sun through clouds.
5. Pink trees

May we walk in Beauty!

Fools Poem

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Parable of the Rich Fool, Rembrandt (This one is new to me.)

Tomorrow is April Fools Day, which means it is also the first day of National Poetry Month. It’s a Fool’s Journey, the decision to write a poem every day for a month, even when things are feeling tight and busy. Still, it would be foolish to give up the writing and the striving to write just because my life is busy. So here’s to the new month. I am diving in! I will be creating my own prompts this month. Feel free to join me! You can post your poems in the comments section, if you like, or email me your endeavors at 4goldfinches@gmail.com, if you want to share.

  
Polikushka’s Despair, from Tolstoy’s “Ivan the Fool,” and “King Lear and the Fool in the Storm” by William Dyce

For an April First Poem, write about the Fool. Consider your own fool’s journey, your own madcap dance on the edge of the cliffs, throwing caution to the winds. I once wrote an acrostic poem about the fool, using the words DANCING ON THE CLIFF’S EDGE for the first letter of each line. Fool that I am, I seem to have misplaced it, let it flutter off into the past.

  
The Fool on the Hill in the Bisti Badlands, by John Fowler; The Fool from the Rider Waite Tarot Deck, by  Pamela Colman Smith–the image of the Fool archetype. 

Gratitude List:
1. Things come together. Things get done. Sleep gets slept.
2. This man who is decorating a birthday cake for a boy’s birthday party tomorrow.
3. Rain. Then it stops. (Hoping for a clear day tomorrow–I don’t want a houseful of small boys.)
4. Shining eyes
5. Pablo Neruda

May we walk in Beauty!

Eight Candles

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Gratitude List:
1. People who cry when they read the sad parts in books. I am thinking of a particular student wiping her eyes as she finished the last pages of her most recent book.
2. Cherry blossoms
3. The tight fists of buds in the Flinchbaugh orchards. Some tiny blooms, too.
4. This parenting gig. Birthdays remind me how precious it all is, and how fleeting.
5. People are still talking about the Senior Presentations. During Tuesday’s final group, the rooms were packed, the energy was high, and the support was evident. People were pronouncing blessings on their fledglings. I love to hear students speak of how much they appreciate their teachers–it gives me a new and deeper appreciation (already deep) for my colleagues.

May we walk in Beauty. May we shower each other with Blessings.

Goodbye, Baby

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“Six days until my birthday!”
“It’s three days until my birthday!”
And today: “Do you know what tomorrow is?” he asks me, dancing about the room.

And each time, especially as the day nears, I can almost feel myself once again that strange sea creature of late pregnancy, stranded on land, awkward, ungainly, tethered to gravity. Eight years ago right now, I was in the early stages of labor, determined that this one was going to work in the natural way. By morning, we decided that it was time for another caesarean section, and Josiah Pearse came into the world.

I did love pregnancy and the baby years, but I also felt like I never quite lost that gravity, that awkwardness, as long as I was toting tiny people around, anxious and sleep-deprived. Today, I feel like (except for the fighting and territoriality between the two) we’re entering a sort of sweet spot in the family years. Still, reaching eight feels like a particular farewell to babyhood, and I can almost feel the transformation in this exact moment of the year-change. He seems taller, more big-kid, more angular than ever. His teeth seem to be too big for his face and his elbows and knees stick out all over the place. This happens every spring, but this year it seems particularly acute and poignant.

Goodbye, Baby.

Gratitude List:
1. My obsessions run deep. Last night I dreamed that oriole had returned.
2. Robin singing his rain song, announcing that he belongs to the family of thrush.
3. Purple carpets of dead nettles in the field. And carpets of foamy blue speedwell.
4. The dawn, and a just-budding tree against the dawn, and a watchful hawk on a branch of the tree.
5. That thumbnail of a new moon.

May we walk in Beauty!

Moon-Ducking Sage

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Dropping Keys
by Hafiz

The small woman
builds cages for everyone
she
knows,
while the sage,
who has to duck her head
when the moon is low,
keeps dropping keys all night long
for the
beautiful
rowdy
prisoners.

I like to read this poem and think of myself as the sage, dropping those magical keys for the beautiful rowdy ones. If I am truthful, I should also look at myself as the small woman, and consider the cages I build for others, for certainly I do. As a parent, as a teacher, I am an Enforcer of Rules, and as such, a cage builder. And also, I am one of those rowdy beautiful folk awaiting the freeing rain of keys. I suppose the important thing is to stay awake and aware to the ways in which I am each of these, and to ever seek the way of that moon-ducking sage.

Gratitude List:
1. The glowing yellow skin of that awakening willow tree
2. Six blackbirds in a row along a branch
3. Finding my way back to the country of sleep
4. Using our voices
5. Dropping the keys for the beautiful rowdy prisoners

May we walk in Beauty!

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Spring anemones.  Windflowers.

Gratitude List:
1. That which discomforts and unsettles me, moving me onward from the safe and comfortable spaces, into the new and transformative spaces
2. The web we all exist on
3. Time out of time this afternoon. Sitting in a room with friends reading poetry
4. The snow didn’t destroy all the flowers
5. The answer is always Love

May we walk in Beauty!

Long Gratitude

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Last year at a wedding shower, I received a sweet little aloe in a little round pot. Today, I re-planted it and its four babies. “Where there is love, there is life. –Mahatma Gandhi,” said that little tag attached to it. My how love has grown! May it always be so. May love find a way. Blessings to Hugo and Philip. May their love be a blessing to others.

Gratitude List:
(I didn’t do one yesterday, so I am taking liberties today.)
1. A whole flock of turkeys in the field across from Flinchbaugh’s this morning.
2. Bees in the windflowers and crocus.
3. The blue eye of speedwells all across the lawn.
4. Bluebirds murmuring around the hollow.
5. Phoebe looking for a place to nest.
6. Hot tea with milk and honey.
7. Warm sunshine
8. The scent of spring rain: petrichor is the word I’ve heard for it.
9. Green ink
10. The magic of writing: fonts, typeface, the alphabet, calligraphy
11. The Book Fairy has struck again! The children have half a new bookshelf of new things to read.

May we walk in Beauty!

The Murmuration in the Woods

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Gratitude List:
1. Listening to this Winnie the Pooh of a kid humming and singing to himself while he plays: “Umpity Dumpity Dumpity Dum,” and riffs on sounds that pop into his head.
2. Vultures on a billboard by the bridge this afternoon, wings out to the sun.
3. The murmuration flew through the woods behind the house this afternoon, whooshing through the trees.
4. Revising and editing
5. Onion Bagels

May we walk in Beauty!