Author: Beth Weaver-Kreider

Pushing Back the Shadow

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Another day to wait until the prompt comes.  Here is a photo that one of my boys took last summer.

Gratitude List:
1. The hymn sing at Freiman Stoltzfus’s Gallery last night.  We sat on wooden benches like in a Mennonite meetinghouse.  The music was palpable; I think I could taste it, smell it, see the colors of it washing against the walls catching the rich brilliance of Freiman’s paintings.  It is still clinging to me this morning.  All those voices, harmonies. Strangers and friends giving our voices to each other.  I don’t know how to explain why this is so, but it seemed like a healing act, like sound therapy for a hurting world, pushing back the vicious shadow.
2. All the humming that happens in my house.  Yesterday, Jon was changing laundry in the basement, and I could hear him humming through the floorboards.  At the same time, a boy was humming to himself while he read back issues of This Old House.  The other boy was making a fanciful helicopter of Legos, and humming a third thing to himself.
3. The twin red maples near that one industrial plant on Route 30.  Every day I pass them twice.  All the other trees have either dropped their leaves completely, or left the season of brilliance behind.  Not these folks.  Their shades of scarlet and orange pulse and shimmer, especially in these grey days. The dryads seem to have something to tell us.
4. Yesterday I read about a woman–an American–who gathered baby carriers and took them to Macedonia, where she waits for the ferry from Lesbos and fits them on families with babies and toddlers.  She spoke of the relief in the eyes of parents who now had free hands to care for their older children, of the father who could not stop kissing the tiny head now tucked safely beneath his chin.  Bless the helpers.
5. The peacemakers are rising.

Join hands.  Rise up.  Walk in Love.

High Upon the Dream Scene

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Solomon Shandy

Write a strange poem, he says.  Sort of inspired by the hype and hip of Sharon Bryan’s “Sweater Weather: A Love Song to Language.”  (I am stopping before I feel this poem is really finished–I am stuck in the web of the poem and I think that I have learned from it what I wanted to learn.)

High upon the dream scene,
water golden, meadow green,
shadows calling, day is falling,
where you wander unseen.

From the inky shadows ooze
spectres that you did not choose
wraiths are creeping, nightmares leaping
into dreamtime’s twisting blues.

In the maze you race and blunder,
running from the sound of thunder.
Heart is pounding, rest confounding,
caught within the spell you’re under.

I can’t seem to get out of this poem–I guess that’s how the nightmares roll.  But I need to get on with my day, so I am going to just stop here.  I did love the way the rhythm and the rhyme scheme sort of defined themselves as I wrote.

Gratitude List:
1. Labyrinths.  I have been under a compulsion again lately to doodle them.  After an experience last week in which I felt like someone was trying to stuff me into a claustrophobic little box, I think my default was to head into the labyrinth for safety.
2. Sitting on the chair in the sun this morning, with a small person reading to me.
3. Fall veggies.
4. Generosity.  Local folks gave over six million dollars yesterday to organizations that offer care and hope to the world.  I am proud of this community.  My shaken faith in humanity is being rebuilt.
5. Breathing love into the wounds.

May we walk in Beauty!

Plunder

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Today’s prompt is to use at least three of these words in a poem: lagoon, plunder, artifact, wobble, relent, horrendous.  I love these.  They pull me out of my ruts.

After the relentless storm and plunder,
after the horrendous calm,
she searches the silent pools,
she scours the quiet caves of the lagoon,
she watches the gulls winging down the beach,

seeking for surviving artifacts
shining fragments that glint in the sunlight,
pearls scattered in the glistening sands.

The hunt for the missing pieces
occupies her haggard attention
and draws her thoughts away from the loss.

Salvage becomes her salvation.

Giving Back

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eat veggies

Gratitude List:
1. Giving.  Today is Lancaster’s Extraordinary Give, a community celebration of local groups and organizations that do good work in the world.  Here is the link to my school’s page.  If you click on the title at the top of the page, you can see the other organizations involved.  You can also see that since the giving opened at midnight 6 hours ago, already over half a million dollars has been donated to helpful organizations.
2. My friend Daryl Snider’s chapel presentation at school yesterday.  Open-hearted and thoughtful–the kids were engaged.  And I woke up this morning with his song in my head, “Yours are the eyes I see in the mirror.  Yours are the cries I hear in my sleep.  <I can’t pull out the words to the next bit>  Because you are I and I am you.”  We are all connected.
3. The helpers.  These people often find their way onto my list.  I can imagine nothing more hopeful and sustaining in the face of that which angers and terrifies us than the quiet and powerful work of those who simply step up and into the breach, reaching out their hands.  People in many places will try to use our fear and rage and despair to distract us, but the helpers are ignoring the fear-mongers and getting down to work.  And if our own stories or fears or needs keep us from stepping right up to the front line with the helpers, we can still reach out our hands to hold them, to make a net of support for the work that they do.
4. The coming break.  Fall is a bit of a long stretch for teachers, with fewer natural breaks than the spring.  The challenge is important, but it’s nice to see the end of this tunnel.
5. Late fall crops.  I got home yesterday, and Jon and the crew had set up the market room for the first of our fall pick-ups: broccoli, cauliflower, arugula, radishes, spinach, sweet potatoes. . .  Time to feast.

May we walk in Love.

“No Ideas but in Things”

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Today’s prompt is to follow William Carlos Williams’ thought, “No ideas but in things,” and write a thing-poem. I have no wheelbarrow, no jar in Tennessee, no plums in the icebox.  I am obsessed with bowls.

Is it the way the light shines
on the concave surface of the blue bowl,
or the way the shadows gather
underneath its curving belly?

Or is it, rather, about the beach pebbles
and the shell with its iridescent green
resting in its sheltered slopes?

Perhaps it is the memory of wet clay,
the hands that scooped and stretched,
that shaped and fashioned its elegant contours.

How it settles, how it breathes in the lamplight,
how it speaks my name when I pass by.

The Peacemakers are Rising

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No prompt again this morning.  I can forgive him–I am sometimes a little behind, too.

Here’s a Gratitude List:
1. The helpers, people who dive in to rescue the refugees from their boats, who help to resettle people here, who offer a bottle of water, a piece of fruit, an encouraging word.
2. The rising clamor of voices calling for peaceful solutions and responses.  The peacemakers are rising.
3. The student who came to me for help in redrafting her college entrance exam–she wants to become a nurse so she can have skills to offer in places around the world where people are suffering.
4. Love.  It casts out fear.
5. Again, that fantastic formation of starlings that wheels and swirls above the hollow.  We can create a beautiful dance, too, when we fly together.

Let’s raise our voices in the name of Compassion, Beauty, and Peace.

Lightbulb

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Today’s prompt came late, after I had begun my school day, so I’m only getting to it now.  The prompt is to write an idea poem.

God is disruptive, he told us.
That’s a new one, I thought.

Perhaps that’s how it ought to be,
he said, not letting you settle
too deeply into the ruts,
pushing you off your perch,
disturbing your equilibrium,
subverting your comfort zone.

She chases me out into the desert,
colors me out of the lines,
thinks me out of the box.
How else should I want it,
I, who choose the savannah
over the closed cathedral?

I’m not entirely sure that this is true to me.  Perhaps for those of us who choose the fields rather than the boxes, the disruption comes in the form of those who would try to reel us in and lock us into their claustrophobic rooms.  This is actually the disruption that I experienced this past week, though I am not sure I would connect it to the message from a disruptive Godde.

Small Ones

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This was from the first of November.

No poetry prompt yet this morning.  I’ll post that later, but I have to get off to school, now.

Gratitude List:
1. New chapters in the book
2. A murmuration in the hollow
3. Hobbits.  When Tolkien needed someone to place in the face of the great rising evil in his story, he chose the small ones.  You and I are the small ones, friends.  Let’s join hands and stand together.  Let’s work together, speak together, sing and whisper and shout together.
4. Short bursts of energy in the long jog
5. A good story to listen to on the way to and from school.

May we walk in Beauty!

Ode to a Flock of Crows

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Too much in a hurry to seek out a birdy sort of photo for today.  Here’s a picture of the late fall farm season.

On the Two-for Tuesday prompts, I usually try to combine the two pieces of the prompt, to let the opposite ideas create a dynamic tension in the poem.  Plus, I hate to feel as though I am missing out on any part of an experience.  Today’s is a little more complicated, and I might just have to settle for one piece.  We’ll see what happens.  Here’s the prompt:

 

  1. Take the phrase “Ode to a (blank),” replace the blank with a word or phrase, make the new phrase the title of your poem, and then, write your poem.
  2. Take the phrase “(blank) is for the Birds,” replace the blank with a word or phrase, make the new phrase the title of your poem, and then, write your poem.

How they wheel and settle,
wheel and settle.
Their business is their own.

When the trees along the tracks
have lost their leaves,
and reach their naked branches
into the salmon-colored sky,
their crowns fill with crows.
Connect the dots,
a web of birds fills the world.

These are the people of the wind,
the warriors of autumn.
Watching them, even I
can turn my face toward the winter.

Gratitude List:
1. The crowd of crows.  I always feel like I have to qualify this for the people who have to live more closely with them, because I, too, get tired of the purple pokeberry splotches all over my car from the starling flock in the hollow, but I love the crows that wheel and settle in the trees near the mall.  I love seeing them just as the sky is beginning to turn orange, and they dot the treetops and electrical wires.
2. Challengers.  They give you a chance to look at your internal world, and remind you to keep checking in with yourself and to be faithful to your inner truth.
3. Compassionate hearts.
(I wasn’t really going for a C theme today, but now I think I need to finish it out.)
4. Coffee.  It gets me through the morning.
5. Creativity.  Building up and creating are a great antidote to despair and rage.

May we walk in Beauty!

Haunting

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2012 February 058

Today’s prompt is to write a haunted poem.

Everything leaves its imprint,
like the stain of a leaf long-gone to soil
which moldered on the concrete walk
leaving its shadow for another season’s grace.

Your very atoms press against the air,
push through the space around you.
Why should the sense of you be gone
when you are gone?  Why shouldn’t your image
remain behind to haunt the space you filled?

When you turn a corner you will see them,
in those rooms you inhabit inside your soul,
shifting lights and shadows,
mirages or reflections.

Listen for the whispering:
“I was here. I will always be here.”

Gratitude List:
1. Richard Rohr.  Remember, it’s about grace.
2. The Subversive Jesus.  Who is throwing stones?
3. Earthshine.  Have you seen how we light up the moon, even when she is only a sliver?
4. Meeting the day.
5. You.  How you receive the world with open arms.  How you do not judge the worthiness of others or separate people into categories or close doors to keep some out and to lock others in.  How you remind me that there are still people who walk in the way of grace.

May we walk with Great Grace.