Author: Beth Weaver-Kreider

Something from a Dream

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

You know about the woman
who walked through walls, right?
Her long-eyed gaze.
Her straightening of shoulders.
Lifted chin.
Deep breath.
Then

she’d slide right through.
A shimmering.
A sucking sound.
And then a ringing in your ears,
like a chime.

I don’t know if this
is story or poem or dream.
You saw her go,
you knew the distances
she’d traveled to get here.

I will never forget
the color of her eyes.

 

(That one needs a Dali clock in it somewhere.  Not sure exactly where it came from.  Sometimes those are the most delicious to write.)

Gratitude List:
1.  Wild weather.  Yes, I am anxious, too, about the possibility of flash flood, especially here on the farm.  But something King Lear-ish in me wants to go wander the hills in it.  It makes me feel so alive.
2. A lovely morning yesterday with my five-year-old.  He likes to shop.  So we went shopping.  Spent a long time at Hinkle’s just looking at all the little Schleich animals.  I fell in love with a chimpanzee mother and her baby.  He liked the alligator.  This is bittersweet.  In the fall, he and I will both be in school, and we will both be older and wiser.  May he always access his powerful ability to marvel and wonder.
3. Doodling.  It releases some sort of blockage in the brain, doesn’t it?  Makes you able to walk through walls, perhaps.
4. Bats.  They’re back in the hollow or out of hibernation, if that’s the story.  May they thrive here.
5. Did I mention the weather?  This wild rain.  It evokes.  Remember the sound of it on a tin roof?  Ooooh, wild rain, wild green.

May we walk in Beauty!

the trees obscure the water towers

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

I am entering a poem in a contest.  Robert Lee Brewer, the host of the Poetic Asides blog, has initiated a contest using his book as the basis.  Take one of his poems, and re-craft or respond or re-work it in some way.  I love the conversational nature of this.  It’s part of what I want poetry to be–conversation.  I don’t know if it’s ethically kosher to type up his poem and put it here next to mine without having asked him first, especially since I don’t have the know-how to indent his lines the way he did.  His is titled “the horizon is marked by water towers overlooking trees,” and the first line was “i’m through with you.”  Mine is a response, and I have patterned it pretty exactly after his, though with a rather different tone.

the trees obscure the water towers
by Elizabeth Weaver-Kreider

you may think you’re through
you with your stoic eyes
building elaborate fences

to escape my rabbit heart
last october and recite elegies
to fierce women pregnant with desire

but you’re not through with me
and my fine road to hell
paved with change and intention

and change has escaped your professorial eye
your old man’s disillusion
there’s so much we could’ve

but you can’t be really through
because tonight when I am out dancing
alone in fields under the moon

releasing the story of what was
you will come to me like leaves swirling
like the wild geese over the meadow

 

Gratitude List:
1. Poetic conversation
2. How ideas spark ideas, how creative thought fires creative thought
3. The peaceful faces of sleeping children
4. Awakening to birdsong (even if it gets me up way too early these days)
5. You.  You hold me and the rest of us so beautifully in your bowl of heart.  You teach me how to ask for help.  You show me light through the brambles.  You remind me to shoulder my ax, to notice the bright birds, to be careful on the path.  Mostly, you remind me not to despair because the world cannot be on the brink of disaster with helpers like you in it.

May we walk in Beauty!

Words on the Wolf

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

Oh, that wolf.
I’ve walked with her before,
known her own shadow for mine.

Never been one to run with the pack,
but I can say I know her,
have even felt her companionship
to be a comfort.

Still, when she howls at the door,
I lose all my post-modern feminist sensibility.

Translation:
I cower in terror
under the covers.

Translation:
I am not walking out that door.
No, this is not the time to make friends.

The old metaphor still stands.
My, what big teeth you have.
And I am so very small,
and my grandmother, my children,
so very fragile and helpless.

This story is so full of people,
yet there’s no one in this story but me.
So I shoulder my ax. . .

In order to make it through this story
you have to live each character
until you’ve circled back around,
seen your own shadow

and recognized
again
the wolf.

 

Gratitude List:
1. The wolf.  Still, she makes me quake.  Someday, I think she’ll get me.  But she keeps me moving, keeps me alive.
2. I got the job.  I can’t think of a way to say it that comes near to expressing my gratitude, my sense of things falling together as they needed to.  I will be teaching high school English at Lancaster Mennonite School, doing something I love, using the skills I was trained for, at my own alma mater.  I’ll be teaching kids from really diverse backgrounds, teaching a subject that fires me up.  I don’t have to relinquish either the poet or farmer identities.  And at its most basic it fulfills the two important elements that I was seeking: of being full-time work that fits the schedule of my family.
3. MOON.  I almost thought I could walk up the hill and take her in my arms.
4. That chilly mist out there.  Makes me feel like a hobbit.  I want to travel, to adventure.  Bring on the wolves–I’m ready!
5. Poetry.  Goodness.  Have I ever put poetry on my gratitude list?  I think it should be there every day, along with my family, along with breathing.

May we walk in Beauty!

 

Riff

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I’m just going to riff on some sounds this morning, I think, get a train of thought going down the track and see where it goes.  Don’t mind me.  It all began when a friend posted a photo of a coyote on my FB page this morning.  Who knows what will come of it?  Sort of like the day that is being born at the moment.  I might just try to riff my way through the day a little bit, too.  Here goes:

when you post the photo
of that lonesome fellow
coyote on the go

when you know
how that long road
leads to nowhere
to nowhere

when you venture
through the veils
in the center of your dreams
in the very seeming center
of your dreams

then you believe
then you know
that the answer
will not show itself
in words

 

Gratitude List:
1. Word play
2. Sense of impending rain
3. Good solid sleep
4. More than one possibility
5. Writing on the porch

May we walk in Beauty!

Who is Pushing them in?

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My father, a physician, used to give talks about healthy diet and lifestyle.  One story that he used to tell has really stuck with me.

Once there was a little town located beside a wide and perilous river.  Occasionally townspeople would rush to the aid of someone who had fallen in upriver.  At great risk to their own lives, they would mobilize and save a hapless stranger from drowning.  As time went by, and more and more of these rescues began to occur, the little town developed an excellent rescue aid society.  They had their own boats and equipment.  They held fundraisers to support the River Rescue Society.  Volunteers trained long hours.

Over time, more and more people came floating by, in peril of drowning, and the town’s rescue crew grew and grew.  They began to post watchers on the shoreline because the numbers of people in need of rescue had begun to increase monumentally.  It was all the little town could do to keep up with the work.  But they were proud of their River Rescue Society.

One night, at a town meeting, the topic on the table for discussion was (once again) the need for more money to fund the Rescue Society.  They were now in need of full-time watchers on the shore and more money for training and research into the best techniques for safely pulling people out of the river.  Finally a quiet woman who had been knitting in the corner stepped up to the microphone and asked, “Perhaps we ought to send someone upriver to discover who is pushing all these people in?”

Yesterday, I found out that yet another friend of mine has cancer.  Leukemia.  Two friends of mine are walking with their mothers through the rocky terrain of breast cancer at the moment.  I find it alarming and disconcerting, the way we just accept that cancer is a way of life for us now.  I’m glad that we’re working so hard on the rescue side of this story.  I am so grateful for the treatment options for my friends, for my friends’ mothers, for your friends and family members.  It seems to me that in recent years, the number of people floating down this particular river has increased rather dramatically.  What are we going to do about figuring out who is pushing them in?

We can start, I think, by letting the dandelions grow.  Refusing to put chemicals on our lawns and gardens.  Cleaning our houses with soap and water and vinegar instead of chemicals.  We can pay attention to the food we put into our bodies, where it comes from, what practices were used to grow it.  We can stop drinking out of plastic containers.  These things will not ensure that we don’t fall in the river ourselves, but they might begin to slow down the numbers of people who do.  We need to take a look upriver, and find out who has been pushing all these people into the river.

 

Gratitude List:
1. A lovely day yesterday with my mother-in-law
2. Singing together–I love that my son joins in with the hymns in church
3. Community–how it falls together sometimes, how we can also work to build and maintain it intentionally
4. Anticipation (as edgy as it can make me, I love having possibilities to dream)
5. Language and the gifts it offers to our reasoning brains

May we walk in Beauty!

My Falling-Down Heart

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Sometimes I write because an obsession catches me, and I write not so much to offer my thoughts to the world, but to get it out of my system so something else can come.  That’s why I have written this poem.  Perhaps it’s part of what this poem means, too.  I don’t think it’s a cohesive whole yet.  But it’s got to come out so I can find space inside myself to notice something else, to write about something else.

This year he’s made himself so visible to me,
sitting low in the twisting fingers of sycamore
so the morning sun sets his feathers on fire.

Or clashing into the magenta hearts of dogwood blossoms,
preening and fluffing, stretching his wings
in the golden light of morning.

His flame licks from  greening branch
to greening branch and I am helpless.
My heart falls down.

Did Mary Oliver say that first? Or Rumi?
When I say my heart lies in pieces on the floor
I do not mean, The world is grey.

What is the name of this thing?
Perhaps it is amazement over-ripe,
gone sour, fermented to obsession.

It is a good wine, this.  A drug.
I hear him whistle from the trees:
Just one more look.  Just one.

I cannot feed my children.
I can write nothing but the word Orange.
I find myself on the porch, watching the branches

and wonder how I got there.
Were orioles common as robins
I’d be a simple failure at my life.

As it is, I spend my year longing
for these days of whistling flame,
for these mornings when my heart

is beckoned from its winter shell
and shattered on the rocks
like a thousand shining mirrors.

 

Gratitude List:
1. The silence that I had for a few moments this morning
2. Tiny wonders
3. Shattering and shining
4. My mother, who has given me so much, particularly the gift of noticing.
5. This fuzzy cat who is making it almost impossible to type.

May we walk in Beauty!

May Fever

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I don’t see how I can
be expected to participate
in this conversation

when bluebird, carrying his piece of sky,
has just flitted past my field of vision
and into a bough of pink dogwood.

How can I focus on these plans
and preparations and good ideas
when redwing has settled into the foxtails

and calls to me with his buzz and click,
making the grasses sway and dip?
When oriole’s bright flame

is setting fire to the treetop?
When the red-bellied woodpecker
shirrrrrrs and clucks

from the little pear tree?
When the carpenter bee hovers
in front of me, people-watching?

How can I listen to human conversation
when all these voices call incessantly,
whistling and chattering, begging my attention?

 

Gratitude List:
1. The wild, rampant imagination of a five-year-old
2. Bridge of Hope, and its commitment to building communities which protect children and end homelessness.
3. The subjunctive mood (google “Phuc Tran subjunctive” for a great TED talk on the subject)
4. My articulate sister Valerie, and the way she weaves words.
5. So much is dawning.  So much is greening.  So much is coming to birth.  Unfurl!

May we walk in Beauty!

Simply Gratitude

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Gratitude List:

1.  Smell of honey when I was mowing today near the hives
2. This marvel of a boy I gave birth to eight years ago.  His constant curiosity, his tender heart, his obsessive thirst for new knowledge, his humor, his kindness.  Shiny One.
3. I beat myself up for this one, but I love to mow.  I love the satisfaction of having mowed.  I love the way the place looks tonight.
4. Sleep. . .zzzzzz
5. Unfurling.

May we walk in Beauty!

Where Wonder Enters the Soul

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Here is a re-post of a poem I posted last April 14.  I can’t believe that Oriole was here already in mid-April last year.  But this may have just been me hoping for their return to the hollow.  I don’t know.

Through the Door

These are the doorways.  The passages
where wonder enters the soul on tiptoe.
Here is the speedwell,
up from the earth and smiling through snow.
The breath of the wind
on the ice-white wing of the gull.

Gull’s feather,
the beating heart of the honeybee,
and the black lace veil of the monarch.
The moment of hush before sunrise.

These are the liminal spaces.
The cocked arm and quiet face of a sleeping child.
The birth of a new idea.
The rousing of thought to action
and action to hope.
The hope that is borne
on the wings of the wren.
The way the weight of sadness
will slide away from your eyes
to make a little room for joy.

This is the breaking news of the heart.
First the aconite and speedwell,
then windflower and crocus.
These are the vanguard, the silent scouts.

For the purposes of this poem
I will be equating gratitude with wonder
and wonder with spring.
Wonder enters on tiptoe.

A flash of impossible orange
flickers high in the sycamore.
From the newest leaves
on the highest branch
comes a rustling, then a whistle
like calling a dog.
The oriole returns to summon the summer home.

And you–you may stand in the doorway
as long as you like.
Let that bright bird
open spaces for new joy
to fill the rooms
where sadness used to be.

Book Cover
That poem appears on page 18 of my new book.
Buy it here.

Gratitude List:
1.  A wonderful job interview today at a place where I can happily imagine myself.  I know better than to assume anything, but if I do not get the job, I am still extremely grateful for the chance to talk about things that matter to me, and for the boost that this has given to my confidence.
2.  The way dreams work their way into daytime realities and help to navigate the emotional landscape.
3.  Robin’s eggs.  I have found three or four already this spring, and I can see where the careful pecking from inside opened them.
4.  Sunlight through ferns.
5.  The Birds of Fire.  This morning, thinking I was seeing a pair of blackbirds squabbling in the poplar tree, I was amazed to see that they were actually the rusty glowing embers of the Orchard Oriole.  A few minutes later, trying to find where the Baltimore Oriole was singing way at the top of the poplar, I suddenly saw that dancing orange flame of a bird, flitting from branch to branch.  Then Beauty, she said, “But wait!  There’s more!”  And this evening after supper, she showed us the dazzle of a scarlet tanager burning away in the pear tree.  And whose heart can encompass all that color–all that fire–in one day?

May we walk in Beauty!

Messages

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

2014 April 119

Insect hieroglyph.
Message for the guardians
of this green River.
Like thunderbirds on the rocks
where ancient ones tended her.

Gratitude List:
1. Blowing bubbles on the lawn.  Tonight was one of those occasions I hope the kids never forget.
2. You know how sometimes things fall apart?  And sometimes it feels like they’re sort of meant to fall apart so they can fall into place in a different way? The old paradigm needs to shatter sometimes in order for the new one to form.  And even if the new one doesn’t conform to my personal Plan A, it’s still a good thing that the old one is out of the way.
3. My parents.
4. Mockingbird, Oriole, Blue Jay.  And a story of a Red-Winged Blackbird.  Shiny wing-folk.
5. Jumping off the cliff.  There’s a rainbow out there somewhere to catch me.

May we walk in Beauty.