Author: Beth Weaver-Kreider

Wait for the Story

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

2011 June 227

Today’s prompt is to write a ritual poem.  This is one of my favorite words.  I love internal preparations for sacred and holy moments.  Here is one pathway inward:

It’s a room that you enter, a space you create.
Settle your roots: down, down and deeper,
raising your branches out into starlight.

Breath first, the winds and the breezes,
scent of the morning, shelter of dawn,
many voices calling, whispering, singing.

Feel your fire rising,
energy lifting your spirit like flame.
Burn.  Let desire be the fuel.

The river flows through you, around you, within you:
quiet meandering, raging through rapids.
Gaze deep into pools for the answers you seek.

Stand firmly on earth.  Let it hold you and shape you.
Enter the cave which leads to your center.
Rock is your reason.  Soil is your mentor.

Enter the labyrinth, spiral to center.
You come to the crossroads, the meeting of pathways:
Rest in the shadows.  The story will find you.

 

Gratitude List:
1. Play
2. Work
3. Song
4. Art
5. Well-being

May we walk in Beauty!

Meeting The Guardian

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Girl With Death Mask, by Frida Kahlo

I have never seen this one before.  I post it today because it is one of the images that Robert Brewer offers as inspiration for writing an ekphrastic poem (a poem inspired by or connected to an image).

You have been walking through desert for centuries,
walking for hundreds of miles toward mountains.
Suddenly there in your path stands the guardian.

Every quest, every dream, every task has its challenger–
She who will stand at the gate of your destiny,
waiting to ask you the questions you came for:

What is the thing that you fear?  Can you face it?
What is the name of the monster that haunts you?
Can you look death in the eye and say, “Feed Me”?

If She reveals Herself at your parting,
you must be ready to hold what She offers you:
a small golden aster and three white-hot stones.

Gratitude List:
1. The principals at my school.  They’re thoughtful, supportive, restorative, and they have a keen and careful vision for the school community.
2. This morning a small boy asked me to do stretches with him, like they do in school every morning.  I love that his teacher is teaching them to stretch as well as to read.
3. Challengers.  I am trying really hard to turn this one into a gratitude.  Deep, deep down, I truly am actually grateful for yesterday’s challenger moment.  (Perhaps I need to do some more stretches to help that bit of gratitude bubble upward.)
4. Autumn wind: it calls me to adventure.
5. The helpers.  All those people in Paris and Beirut who ran to help, who offered safe houses, who hugged and held and helped.  It seems to be too much of a truth today that some people will lash out and try to harm.  But as much of a truth and greater is that more people will rush in to help and to heal.  May it always be so.

May we carry healing with us wherever we go.

Stones for Memory

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Carin

Today’s prompt is to write a poem about memory.

I have always envied others their power of memory.  My own is so fickle, so capricious, unreliable.  My ability to concentrate and memorize poetry or lines for a play in the present moment are, I think, above average.  I’m nowhere close to having a photographic memory, but I feel like I understand the brains of people who do.  This has served me well in the short-term.  I can quickly learn a story, hold a lesson plan, memorize a poem, prepare for a play.  But my powers of remembering in the long-term are, I think, way below the average.  I can remember very few of the teachers in my growing up years.  Even college, even grad school, even my first years of teaching–all are receding, dragged backward out of my memory.  This has always been kind of painful for me.

What I tell myself is that I live in the present so completely, that the butterfly of my personality sits so completely in the now, that I do not take my mind back enough to pull out the pieces of past and examine them, and so they flow out and away.  Perhaps this is not exactly a defect in my personality, but it remains a deep and abiding pain.  I lose the past too utterly, and I do often feel it as a personal deficiency: if only I would get my flightly brain to concentrate more often on what has gone before, perhaps I could keep it, hold on to it.  Still, I cannot make myself hold memory.  My brain is wired for this moment.

I place in the hands of Time these stones:
the story of this day,
the people I have been near to,
the songs the Fates have whispered in my ears,
the colors that haunt me.

See how they turn to mist,
how they glow for a moment–
red, then golden, then blue–
then dissipate like ash blown by a wind
before I can register
that they have lost their substance.

Where does memory go
when it flows out with the tide,
when it slips down the drain,
when it is blown out with the morning fog?

I am still the child in the forest,
walking blind through the swirling mists,
under the shadows of the great trees.
With each forward step on the trail,
a little bird flutters from the pathway behind,
a bread crumb in its beak.

Gratitude List:
1. Memory
2. Longing
3. This moment
4. The shades of dawn
5. Small moments in which to breathe.

May we walk in Beauty!

After the Owl

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EWK 2 001

Today’s prompt is to write a poem titled “After __________”

After the owl booms in the sycamore at dawn,
after your eyes adjust to the darkness,
after you stumble through the washing and dressing,
after the flicker of lights,
after the coffee,
after the tree pose,
after the quiet reading of O’Donohue’s poem,
you arrive with your heart at the blank page.

Gratitude List:
1. Collegiality.  Working as a team.
2. Blank pages.  That is to say, fresh possibilities.
3. Blank pages.  That is to say, a chance to start fresh.
4. Wild geese and starlings
5. Figuring out how to say what I really mean to say.

May we walk in Beauty.

Animal Poem

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Today’s prompt is to write an animal poem:

Sand Castle

Words race and scuttle, crabwise,
across the cluttered dunes of my brain,
leaving runes, cuneiform, in their wake,
scattering the grains of sand from place to place,
and shuffling between the shadows of the dune grass.

When I reach my hand to catch them,
they skitter down a hole or underneath a stone,
while the rude gulls laugh into the wind.

Following the Path of Grace

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There is no prompt up yet, and I have to head to school.  I’ll do a second post later today with the poem.

Gratitude List:
1. Awakenings: Yesterday in a short story, the girl’s boyfriend and his mother offered to help in a chaotic moment at the restaurant.  The dad went out to wait in the car.  This was an incidental sentence in the story, but two of my classes stopped the story and complained about the dad.  They expect more of men these days.
2. Companionship: This bright boy sitting beside me and reading as I write.
3. Redemption. Grace. Restoration:  We don’t always live up to the possibilities.  The people we care for sometimes break or trample the trust we put in them.  Still, we find room for grace.  Today’s grace may be fragile, may be temporary, but I will nurture the hope it offers with everything I can give it, like the tiny, impossible flame we tended at the fire pit a couple weeks ago, giving it our breath, feeding it, believing it would catch.
4. Solitude: Not yet, not yet.  But last night I began my first dreamings for my contemplative solitude retreat this summer.
5. Growth: Sometimes the daily minutiae of teacher-work can make it seem like there is no growth, or that the growth is too small, too slow.  When I step back and look at the progress of students’ work from last year to this, it suddenly becomes clear, like looking at that small oak tree out on the hill.  I cannot see its day-to-day growth, but when I look at it over time, I can see the miracle of its growth.

May we walk in Beauty!

Technology

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Erf. Today’s prompt is to write a technology/anti-technology poem. I love to rant about technology, but I don’t know if I can whip up a poem about it in the fifteen minutes before I have to leave for school.  It’ll have to be a place-holder.

See how it serves you?
The world at your fingertips,
and that such a thrill
that we miss the cliche.

See how it frees you?
All that you need
right there in your hand.
You’re never more
than the press of a button
away from work or diversion,
but the one who breathes beside you
is now a thousand clicks away.

Gratitude List:
1. How the valleys and hollows hold the early morning mist
2. How people hold each other
3. How eyes shine with a new idea
4. How the work just gets done
5. How the air comes alive when the children sing

May we walk in Beauty!

Mistakes

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This morning, I played catch-up, and finished the two incomplete poems for the poem-a-day challenge.  Today’s prompt is to write about a mistake, which is also a writing prompt that I have given my students today, with some great philosophical success–I wrote along with them, and this poem has emerged.

Red ink rains blood
upon the white page.
A slash, a laceration,
opening the wounded sentence
like a scalpel:
scribble, cut, and blot.
Ink on my fingers.

You should know there is
no glee in this.

My ink will run green
across the furrowed page,
teasing growth from the tender rows
of font upon the white field.
Nurture and cultivate,
seeds of new knowledge
sprouting from the even lines.
Your thoughts given form
and reaching for the sun.

Day After

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IMG_0384

I’m a little too early for Brewer’s prompt this morning, so I’ll do one of my catch-ups.  The first day of November, he suggested a Day After Poem.

After the storm
the quiet
the twinkling hush
the pause

Then the sigh,
the quickly in-drawn breath

and then the straightening
the resolve–
first the spine
and then the inner image:

This is what needs to be done.
This is where the road goes.
This is how we carry on.

 

I also missed the United/Divided poem:

It is all about
the process of mitosis:
we will replicate
the past–doggedly, with zeal,
and then evolve the new way.

 

(Mockingbird says that I am not allowed to make comments about mediocrity at the moment, but I don’t always listen to mockingbird.  Meh.)

 

Gratitude List:
1. Yesterday’s children’s story.  I don’t think I have ever before gotten teary about the water cycle.  “Let the wind carry you, little stream.”
2. Resolve.
3. Stories at lunch yesterday.
4. Sumac / gingko / oak
5. Great horned owls calling from the poplar tree.

May we walk in Beauty!

Submerged

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DSCN8708

I realized yesterday that if I sort of scrunch the meanings of a couple of my early November poems into the themes that Robert Lee Brewer suggests on his blog, I only have to write to extra poems to catch up to the Poem-A-Day thing.  I just can’t resist. I will get those two extras written.  Mockingbird reminds me that they don’t have to be super-poems.

Today’s prompt is to write a submerged poem.  I have been wanting to try the triversen form.

Beneath the surface of the dream
where tiny rodents skitter and run
I could feel the story rising.

There, where the memories yield their harvest,
where travelers wander deep in shadow,
I caught its scented breezes.

Inside the dreaming of the house
where rooms went on forever,
lay a village of self to explore.

Below the one about the baby
and the orphaned white kitten
flowed rivers of recognition.

What do you do
when the gods of the dreamings
offer you maps for the journey?

How will you answer
when the night-folk cry out:
“Give us the hope of our meanings!”

Gratitude List:
1. That pecan pie
2. Bridges.  Hope. Bridge of Hope
3. Breathing
4. Dream-work
5. Writing poems

May we walk in Hope!