Author: Beth Weaver-Kreider

Oh, Come On, Alfred!

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today’s Poetry Prompt over at Poetic Asides is to write a dare poem.  This one is in the glosa form.

Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
–T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

Time’s up, Alfred.
Make your decisions.
Settle your score with time
and risk it.
Eat that peach
and grow your hair.
Join those women
in their fancy parlor chats.
Stop asking
“Do I dare?”

Jump in.
Start the next round of Twister.
Knock their socks off, buddy.
That catty fog against the windows
has settled into your soul.
Wear a wig!  Carry a purse!
Swim with the mermaids.
Take up Irish drinking songs,
verse upon verse upon verse.
Disturb the Universe!

Ever since my college days,
you have been sitting
on my periphery,
asking me these questions,
reminding me that hesitations
breed paralysis, a crime
of omission,
of never-having-dared,
waiting patiently in line:
In a minute there is time. . .

And in a minute
the chance is gone,
the mermaids have stopped singing,
your hair has gone gray.
Sure, it could always have been better,
but it could also be much worse.
Step into the center of your life, Alfred,
and all the foggy yellow clouds of doubt
will gradually disperse:
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
Gratitude List:
1. The smell of those soaps I bought at Savemart today: Sandalwood, Rosewood Geranium, and Patchouli.  Scent is one of my favorite senses.  These three beauties have flipped on the happy switch in my brain.
2. My students.  I was reminded today of some of my students from last semester who were wild and disruptive–not at all meanly or even rudely, but enough to tire a teacher.  And thinking about this particular trio, I realized how incredibly fond I am of them all, how something in the challenge of working with them day-to-day and treasuring them rather than letting them get my goat makes me feel a particular delight in the memory of them.
3. Have I mentioned daffodils?
4. Fresh spinach, right from the field.  Give me a few more weeks of this and I might even be an acceptable blood donor again.  Call me the Woman of Iron.
5. Mockingbird has found his springtime voice.  I wish my ears were a little more discerning, and could count the number of calls in his repertoire.  He’s a pretty vociferous polyglot.  (Yeah–purple.  It was fun to say, though.)

May we walk in Beauty!

Do You Remember?

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Today’s poem is a two-fer: write about love and/or anti-love.  I usually really like his double challenges, and I try to work with the polarities.  Today’s poem, however, came out purely on the love side.  I have been re-reading my gratitude lists from this time last year, and one of those gratitudes inspired this poem, which is for my father, whom I and the bluebirds love:

I know this is true,
but it may be a secret:

The Archangel Michael is a bluebird
who gazes into your window
waiting for the moment
you walk into the room:

those clear watching eyes,
the quiet murmuring chirrup,
dip of the head and flip of the wing.

There is a girl on a swing
singing of bluebirds
and you are pushing her so high
she flies.

Gratitude List:
1. Bluebirds and you
2. Chickweed and you
3. Organizing and sorting and you
4. The farm crew and you
5. Free magazines at the library, and you

May we walk in Beauty!

Not What it Seems

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Today’s prompt is to write a things-not-as-they-appear poem.  I keep going back to the Shaman Poem from March 1:

Here is how we make the world:
I will say fire and mean wisdom.
I will say wisteria and mean my thoughts are tangled.
I will say the river is flowing and mean that time is passing.
I will say grandmother’s quilt and mean that the work is love.

I will say house and mean your heart.
I will say spiderweb and mean the prayers are holding you.
I will say the eagle flies and mean my thoughts are with you.
I will say the daffodils are blooming and mean you are healing.

I will say song and mean dream.
I will say dream and mean prayer.
I will say prayer and mean poem.

 

Gratitude List:
1. My neighbor’s bank of nodding sunny daffodils.  (Say Man-who-Plants-Sunshine, and no longer mean Crusty Curmudgeon.  That one is going to take some work.)
2. Freckles on a small boy’s face.
3. A day to organize and tidy the classroom.
4. Playing outside!
5. All the poems of April.  I decided I did not have time curate a Poetree this year.  Still, the Internet is a grand Tree of Poetry.  I am loving reading everyone’s poems.

May we walk in Beauty!

Vegetables

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Today I have been given the tasks of bringing the vegetables to the family Easter dinner, and of writing a poem about vegetables.  I’m not quite sure what this is:

It hasn’t always been this way,
a hand reaching through leaves,
the light, the dark, the light,
and the quick rustle and scamper
of small creatures in the deeper shadows–

a pathway through the labyrinth
of cornstalks, row upon row
snaking along the hillside,
and the wind in the tassels–

an answer settling downward
through the dreaming,
like a leaf gently curving to earth
or a small flat stone sinking
into the shadowy depths of the pond.

 

Gratitude List:
1. Whatever that thing is that gets a poem going
2. I am surrounded by wise people, so many wise and thoughtful people
3. The puzzle–how the lights and darks fit together to make the whole
4. The color orange
5. Love wins

May we walk in Beauty!

Departure

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Today’s prompt is departure.  This poem feels darker, more fatalistic, than I think I feel.  Last week, my husband mentioned that our eldest child, almost 9, is halfway through his childhood.  I think that shadowed this poem.  Still, while I don’t think the emotional tone is entirely accurate for my own state, it feels “true” at some level.

There is an art to the departure,
a craft to the act of letting go,
of settling your heart.
It’s an art.

Where do we start the grieving,
the leaving and unleaving,
separating this from that part?
Where do we start?

But when you burn it down
to its essentials, it’s all about
preparing for departure
in the end.

Perhaps you can extend
small blisses and delights,
the moments in the middle,
when you’ve lit
the brightest lights, the candles,
flames of memory,
names written on your heart.

Still, all is moving toward the ending,
veering ever to a newer,
fresher destination
where other lights will glimmer,
illuminate new memories,
new pathways, new strivings.

Departure is inevitable,
but so is arrival.

 

Gratitude List:
1. Grandma Weaver’s spinach balls
2. Hay rides (Joss and I rode the hay wagon at Flinchbaugh’s 4 times today!)
3. Wind flowers and speedwell
4. Sleeping in
5. People who keep me accountable to doing the inner work.

May we walk in Beauty!

Dea Ex Machina

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Dea Ex Machina

What we speak
we create.
Writing, we make
meaning into existence.

These words, cogs
and gears, shift
meaning to matter:

“Let there be. . .”
And there is.

And it is good.

Gratitude List:
1. The social lives of my children.  Friends.
2. All that dies and decays so that new life may rise and be nourished
3. Chocolate oatmeal cake with caramel icing
4. How words shape meaning
5. Bees

May we walk in Beauty!

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today’s prompt is to write about secrets:

Sing me that song,
the one you wrote
about the woman who
hid from her life
like a lynx in the wood.

Inscrutable.

She guarded her secrets
and melted into her shame,
hiding the flame in her heart,
holding the mystery of her name,
revealing herself to no one.

Remember the ending,
the way that she bent herself
outward one day,
opened her throat like a bird’s
and spoke a single clear note
into the morning,
how she blazed forth,
how she stretched outward,
how she dawned.

 

Gratitude List:
1. Daffodils!  When I got to school this morning, the first little ones were just opening their cups.  This afternoon I got home and the ones out front of our house were open, too.
2. Ideas–how they build and grow, build and grow
3. Chai
4. Color and texture, rhythm and pattern
5. You

May we walk in Beauty!

Here’s to the Fool!

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 4 Comments

Today’s poetry prompt is to write about resistance:

I have seen the way the world is weighted,
heard you murmuring the words
distress, despair, disgrace,
marked the way it seems the fates
conspire to place you
underneath the wagon’s wheel.

If I can try one phrase to bless
this wretched space in which you rest
between the gales and squalls,
let it be this:

May your soul be a sail.

Your spirit will resist the winds that drive you
into dusty earth or claw you from the cliff-face.

May you catch that wind and rise.
May you surprise yourself in flight.

Gratitude List:
1. The Chalice Labyrinth.  Balancing my light and my shadow.  Finding my way across the divide between the different parts of me.
2. Six deer silhouetted in the dusky moment just before dawn.
3. And then the sunrise.  I am learning my colors: magenta, chartreuse, indigo, aquamarine, tangerine.  And there’s one that’s not quite peach and not quite tangerine, something I can’t quite name yet.
4. Walking over the fields with my guys: Jon, the boys, and Fred the Cat.  And that bird: peregrine, perhaps.  Or osprey.  Long crooked wings, and white beneath, sweeping over the fields in the spring breeze.
5. Saying yes to the new thing, new growth, new learning.  Trusting, like the Fool, in the grace of wind to catch me in the leap.

May we walk in Beauty!

Poem a Day

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Tomorrow is the first day of National Poetry Month.  Despite the shift in my circumstances this year, I am going to try to participate in the poem-a-day process again.  After all, I really believe that part of teaching writing well is letting the students see their teachers working at the writing craft themselves.  As usual, I will be following Robert Lee Brewer’s prompts for the month.

Gratitude List:
1. The delight of a small person having a birthday
2. All those crocus: one golden flower among a field of violet
3. Striving, how we learn by striving
4. Generations: being in the middle at the moment
5. Rising to the occasion (perhaps this is a repeat of #3, but it’s actually a hope as well as a gratitude at the moment, so it bears repeating)

May we walk in Beauty!

Vertigo

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

2014 April 020
Last April, lichen

Sitting here in my grandmother’s chair
where she took yarn and hook,
made yards and yards of fabric
loop by precious loop
to cover her family

and reading Pinsky’s “Shirt”
about cloth, about the ones who leapt
to their death from the Triangle fire
and about Irma and her approval
of his own crisp cottons,

was it vertigo
or something else
that gave me the sudden urge
to check whether my seatbelt
is fastened securely?

Gratitude List:
1. Hike and Apple Picnic in the fields with the wee folk
2. The golden-green of the fields in sun across the bowl of the hollow
3. The delight of two happy children upgrading to the next level of bicycle
4. The Beautiful Words board and the way the students have taken to adding their own favorite beautiful words: serenity, wanderlust, wallflower, Nelson, and LOVE (“This is really the only one you need up there, Ms. Weaver-Kreider.”)
5. That sweet little hamster and how she watches for her man to come pick her up, how she gets absolutely still while he pets her

May we walk in Beauty!