Author: Beth Weaver-Kreider

Looking Back

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I have been thinking about all my recent Shakespeare raving, and I realize that, in the interest of basic honesty, I ought to mention that not all my students are as excited about Shakespeare as I am.  Some are, in fact, rather un-keen on the Bard.  Still, I hope that some of them will catch a little enthusiasm for the language and poetry and rich thematic content of his plays.

Today’s prompt is looking back.  I have been toying with images of Lot’s wife and the pillar or salt, of two faced Janus, of mirrors and reflections.

At what point do you decide that you have reached
the edge of the chasm of all the collected moments,
that it’s time to look back and see how far you’ve run?

The end of the month, semester, year–
how have the seasons added up?
What do they add up to?

The real question is,
when I turn my face again
to face the leap before me,
will I feel upon me the gaze
of a future self
looking back upon me?

Gratitude List:
1. The Guard Dogwoods are settling into bloom.
2. Dinner with colleagues.  Good folks.  Good singing.  Good food.
3. Shifts in routine–adding freshness, and pushing me out of my comfort zone
4. That curious little hamster
5. Hosta

May we walk in Beauty!

Strange Bedfellows

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How appropriate!  The prompt for today–and I am not making this up–is to take a word or phrase that was coined by Shakespeare, use it as the title, and then write a poem.  I am in a sort of Shakespeare heaven right now.  Just a couple weeks out from Julius Caesar with the Sophomores, in the middle of Midsummer Night’s Dream with the Freshmen, and just finished a weekend ushering for an excellent student production of The Tempest.  I love being back in academia.  Again, this is a quick poem at the end of a long weekend, a placeholder until I find my way back to these in another couple months.

Strange Bedfellows

Misery acquaints a man–
acquaints a woman, too–
with the oddest of companions,
a fishy-smelling monster
to accompany you through thunders
or a drunken butler
singing to his ukulele.

No matter, there are lessons
in the associations, and sadder
to miss the chance to learn
how much we have in common
than to wander the island alone.

 

Gratitude List:
1. Shakespeare.  I know.  I am obsessed.  I am compiling a list of reasons why your child needs to study Shakespeare to put into an article the next time I have some breathing space to research and write.  Meanwhile, after having watched the LMH production of The Tempest with me last night, Joss (6yo) corrected my Shakespeare reference.  I thought I was quoting Stefano as I drank my smoothie, “That’s a scurvy tune to play at a funeral.  Well, here’s my comfort!” But Joss interrupted me: “No, Mom.  It’s ‘That’s a scurvy tune to play at a man’s funeral.'”  Can you see me smiling?  We’ll work on the sublimer references another day.  For now, they want to play Stefano and Trinculo.  And no wonder.
2. Every single song Lynn led at church this morning, and Michelle’s reminder to consider what it means to be a community.
3. The children have neighborhood friends to play with.  It’s a dangerous hill between us, so we have to walk or drive them to each others’ houses, but they’re making friends in the community, and so–I guess–are we.  That’s a good feeling–to know more of the neighbors.  This is because they go to the local public school.  I don’t know if I’ll ever feel like I am not an outsider at their school, but it’s good to be getting to know some people, and at least two families within a mile.
4. Rumors of a snake in the attic.  I know, but I would love to have a black snake keeping down the potential rodent populations.  The two kindergartners came downstairs today with a story of having seen a rattlesnake.  I figured they must have seen a black snake.  The more reasonable dad-figure supposes it was wires and cables.  Still, it’s a lovely little witchy idea, to imagine one has a snake in the attic.  Feels like a blessing.
5. This breath.  And this one.

May we walk  in Beauty!

Awash

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Today’s prompt is to write an across the sea poem.  Here’s a haiku:

Alas!  I’m awash
in this sea of a season.
I’ll drown in that green.

Gratitude List:
1. Ferns unfurling
2. YWCA and its anti-racism work.  I was proud to support it by joining the Race today.
3. Shakespeare.  I am awash in his poetry.
4. The way the streetlight turned the new leaves on those trees by the Rutt building to a fairy golden.
5. Reading books with the kids in the new fort that Jon built out by the United Melvin Hall.

May we walk in Beauty!

Take this Moment

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The prompt for today is to write a poem about a moment.

Stand still within this single moment,
inhabit this room in the house of time
encroached upon by other rooms,
as water approaches an islet in a stream,
or grasses lap against a meadow rock:

a gathered space around which
other spaces gather,
a struck bell,
a plucked string.

And breathe it in.

Gratitude List:
1. The gold that leaked between the layers of cloud this morning just after sunrise.
2. Creativity
3. Shakespeare
4. Stepping into myself–this is one job I never seem to finish.  I guess that’s part of the human journey of becoming.
5. Baby bats

May we walk in Beauty!

Marching

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Yesterday’s prompt was to write a historic poem.  I have been listening to 1776, by David McCullough lately, and it has been bothering me that even today, a book like this can be lauded as a great addition to our understanding of history when it is another basic description of battle after battle after stratagem after battle, with occasional mentions of the atrocities of plunder and rape and murder that went along with it.  Perhaps this is more of a rant than a poem.  It feels unfinished, too, but I need to move on.

The British blamed the Hessians and
the Hessians blamed the British and
the Rebels blamed them both for the atrocities
and probably the blame was on them, too.

The generals and captains moved their armies
through the cities and the orchards,
through the villages and through the towns.

Such constant disappointments
for those in high command,
such fear of wrong decisions,
of losing face and looking weak.

What if the reinforcements don’t arrive?
What if the soldiers run in fear?
What if the enemy has better guns?

But this is just the surface of the story.
The real tale is told always in the shadows,
the oblique or marginal reference
to ravishment and pillage,
cattle slaughtered, villages displaced.

The commanders and the generals
were quite disgusted with the plundering
performed by other armies in the war.
Always mentioned as atrocities
with a sigh of the scholar’s pen,
before we move along
to battle plans once more.

As long as we keep writing history
as a necessary chess match,
writing the real costs into the margins,
giving the scholar’s nod to the horrors
before moving on to further tactics
we can excuse our appetite for war,
and ignore the real story.

Gratitude List:
1. The Tempest.  The play.  The Bard.  Those incredible student actors.
2. Affirmation.  Reminders that I have stepped on to the right path.
3. The gentle sounds of morning.
4. Good coffee.
5. The rhythm of work and rest.

May we walk in Beauty!

To a Thorn Tree

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Today’s thematic prompt is to write a nature poem.   Perhaps, even with its thorn tree image, this is not exactly a nature poem.  It is a poem I have been needing to write.

Small tree,
torn and twisted
in the sun of the savannah,

I have seen the small scars
lining the tender inner branches,
the places where thorn buds emerge,
where thorns have been torn
from your soft bark,
lines like tally marks:
surviving this one,
and this one,
and this.

Adept at catching and tearing,
you hold and you scratch,

with a need as big as the world
and a horror of needing.
Notice me, notice me–
Oh, don’t

notice me.
Little tree,
torn from your source,
your roots cling in this soil
even as your scarred and stunted arms
reach and grasp the passing breeze.

Gratitude List:
1. The smell of spring blooming in the hollow
2. Mockingbird on the chimney-top, singing me home
3. Playing harmony on the violin with the Ellis the cellist
4. Josiah’s Earth Day Party
5. Being present

May we walk in Beauty.

What I Am

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Today’s two-part Tuesday prompt is to write a “What you are / What you are not” poem.  I cannot get my mind away from Billy Collins’ “Litany.” I cannot get Edie Brickell’s “What I am is what I am is what you are or what”out of my head.  I cannot stop thinking about Shakespeare’s “Shall I compare thee.”  And I am so, so sleepy.

What I am is just sitting on the edge
of the table, barely able to function,
a brain that has already set,
before that gentle sliver of a moon,
before the aggressive shine of Venus.

I am holding on to the wakeful spot of my day
like a spider to the thread
that is just about to break in the wind.

What I am is the one who sits between worlds
greeting the ones who enter the gate,
wishing too could wander across the threshhold.

 

Gratitude List:

1. The way my sons’ school is emphasizing Earth Day, as a way to begin making changes in their family’s lifestyle, asking children to make notes about specific things their families do to change their behaviors.  I like it.  Sure, it’s not enough,  but it’s that one little bit to start, and hopefully it makes more people more aware.
2. The art displays going up at school.  I am finding myself feeling extremely jealous of my students. I would so deeply love to take some of these art classes myself.  Their work is phenomenal.
3. Re-planning.  Sometimes plan A gets a little murky and confusing after it’s been reworked and redrawn so many times.  It’s nice to put the paper down and start fresh, using the old map as a guide.
4. Poem-a-Day.  It is exhausting.  It is frustrating.  It is exhilarating. I am learning a great deal about myself.
5. Prose poetry.  I am going to try working in this form, just as soon as I can catch my breath.

May we walk in Beauty!

My Cat, the Alchemist

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Ah.  This is awkward.  Today’s prompt is to name your poem “My (fill in), the (fill in).”  For some reason cat and alchemist were in my brain, and I didn’t manage to exorcise them before they started to become a poem.  Silly, perhaps, or campy, but something in me sort of likes it.

My Cat, the Alchemist

He takes me in my sleeping state
and transmutes me to my waking self,
reaching through the gates
between those two worlds
with a cry like a human babe

and claws that shred
the stuff of dreams
to ribbons of image,
figments of half-memory,

and I am running faster
down that railroad bridge,
running from a lion
who keeps calling my name,

I am pulled from my quiet wanderings
through the empty rooms of a house
I both know and don’t know.

Some nights I can pull myself
gently back between the bars,
mend the tattered cloth of dream
and sail back into my night voyages.

Often, though, I find myself
wriggling and twisting, caught
in the bars between worlds,
neither quite here, nor quite there,
but an industrial purr beside me
and a small warm body against my leg.

Gratitude List:
1. Yes, I am utterly and unquenchably redundant, but have you seen the pink trees?  Pink Trees.  Number one on my gratitude list.  Pink, pink, pink, pink, pink.  “That’s nice,” says Joss, “because pink is my new favorite color.”  <Yes!>
2. Dinner with the dormies.  That was fun and yummy. We took a walk afterward, and a student’s father yelled out his car window that he loves to see families out walking together.
3. Random blessings from strangers.  See #2.
4. The Lego Museum.  Halfway through the DC day yesterday, Joss said, “I want to go home now.  I want to make a Lego Museum.”  Art imitates life.  He could only take in so much before he had to go start creating in response to it.
5. Kindness.

May we walk in Beauty!

Lament

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Today’s prompt is authority.  I decided to do an acrostic.  I wrote this on I-95, on our way home from a wonderful museum trip to Washington DC this evening.

Always there’s someone saying what they think you ought to do: the
Undertaker, the Poet, the Preacher, the Farmer, the Witch.
There’s never any time to really decide to switch your
Horses there in mid-stream, or, for that matter,
On the bank.  Someone’s always in a flutter,
Railing at you to follow their own plan
In perfect detail.  It never gives you
Time to live it for
Yourself.

Gratitude List:
1. Peregrines.  I saw two falcon-y birds on the way to DC this morning.  Perhaps they were only some sort of accipiter, but they made me think of peregrines.
2. Driving into spring.  Only 45 minutes from home, we were already into much fuller foliage.  Red bud trees.  Forsythia along the highways.  And Maryland plants daffodils everywhere along I-83!
3. Deciding to look into the National Gallery for a moment and stumbling on all those Monets and Cezannes and Manets and Gaugins, Cassatts and Morisots.  I knew they were there, of course, and I’ve never raced through them quite the way we did today, but it was a treat to see them with the small people, even if they did act bored.
4. The Air and Space Museum.  Learning more about the moon landing, about the Space Shuttle program, about the ISS.  I hope my boys aren’t going to sign up for a trip to Mars.
5. Riding the Metro with the boys.  “My favorite part of the train ride,” says Youngest, “was the ‘Step back.  Doors closing.'”

May we walk in Beauty, with cherry blossoms falling all around.

Vowel Limit

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Today’s prompt: Choose two vowels and only use those vowels in your poem.  Y is a wild card.  Kind of fun and challenging.  I am choosing I and E because I was thinking of the word thistle today in the fields as we were planting potatoes.

pick this thistle in this field
its sisters will rise in this site

despite the intent
which desires its demise
the thistles will rise

we fiddle, we fidget
intending the best

yet despite my designs
which inspire difference
the thistles will rise

Gratitude List:
1. Planning adventures.  Off to DC tomorrow to ride the Metro, to explore Air and Space, to walk the Mall, and perhaps to see cherry blossoms.
2. Potato planting.  Good help, good company, good hard work.
3. The trees on the hill with their barely-there haze of new red and green.   When I worked at The People’s Place in Intercourse, we used to sell beautiful etchings by the artist Allan Eitzen that I think of whenever I see the trees like this.  I can only find his children’s book illustrations online.
4. Chickadees’ springtime calls: “Suweet!  Suweet!”  Up, then down.
5. Another nice snake skin, this one twisted almost perfectly back around like an ouroboros.

May we walk in Beauty!