yellow walnut leaves
twist and twirl silently earthward
lavishly giving themselves to breeze, to breath
prodigal as love
Gratitude List:
1. Dreams. And dreams.
2. Passages, fledgings, relinquishments
3. Raisin bread toasted
4. Swallows migrating through
5. New rhythms
May we walk in Beauty.
Gratitude List:
1. Luna Moth
2. Halo of morning sun around a black hen on dewy grass coming to greet me in the morning.
3. The parenting village–we don’t have to do it all alone, don’t have to figure it out all alone.
4. Dissatisfaction and satisfaction: a two-sided coin. Right now, I am exploring dissatisfaction as a means to avoid complacency and getting-stuck-in-a-rut-ness.
5. Ellis is reading Calvin and Hobbes cartoons to Joss.
May we walk in Beauty, fly in Beauty.
Gratitude List:
1. Butterflies. Yes, Mara Eve, there are butterflies! Even a few monarchs. All is not lost.
2. Moments
3. Coming to terms
4. Slumber
5. Tomato sandwiches
May we walk in Beauty.
Tanzanian Silence (1966)
by Ruth Weaver
White hot noonday sun;
The earth, still;
Cattle and birds, silent at midday.
Later a breeze would come sweeping up from the shores of Lake Victoria;
And children would laugh and call and run home from school;
But in this time and place
And at this hour,
Sometimes,
The sound of sheer silence.
In that stillness,
That absence of all sound and movement,
There would come an awareness of sound beyond sound
Stars incinerating themselves?
Cosmic expansion?
The ongoing music of creation?
“And God spoke. . .”
I experience a knowingness
That beyond all the sounds of life on earth
And beyond all the noise of my own inner world
God still speaks.
In the Cosmos and in the heart,
God can be heard.
In stillness.
In silence.
Gratitude List:
1. Learning the poetry of my mother, Ruth Slabaugh Weaver, and my grandmother, Lura Lauver Slabaugh. Experiencing the wisdom and beauty of the voices of the women who have come before me, my mother and grandmothers, my friends who have paved such incredible pathways. (And for my father, for pulling out this poem for my birthday, for poetically suggesting that my mother may have been hearing my own music emerging as she wrote this poem in the year before I was born.)
2. Cicadas
3. Staying afloat
4. So many words, so many stories
5. The imagination of chidren
May we walk in Music, Silence, Stillness, Beauty.
Mockingbird says:
“Greet everyone in their own language, and don’t worry about your accent.”
Gratitude List:
1. That moon. First it wasn’t. There was rain and there was a nighttime overcast. Then there was an odd glow. Then suddenly an orange crescent in the sky.
2. New ways to organize my mind
3. Rhythm. In and out. Round and round.
4. New ideas to take the place of old ones that I have discarded
5. Singing with people I love
May we walk in Beauty.
Gratitude List:
1. The birthday poems. Thank you, my friends. What an amazing day of words it has been. I am bee-drunk on the flowers of your poems. (I asked my Facebook friends to send me poems for my birthday, and the result was an ocean tide of poetry. I am adrift in the most marvelous sea of words.)
2. Ice cream at Sweet Willows. Two dips: Salted Caramel Praline Pecan and Whatever She Wants
3. Zentangling with Ellis. What a marvel to watch how the images and the lines drew him into his imaginative dream-world. “Mom, the gnomes taught me the language of the trees. It’s mostly body language. The tallest ones are the most talkative.” And, referring to one of the pictures we were drawing, “Mom. did I tell you who is the fairy? You are. The gnomes use inventions and the fairies use magic.”
4. Growing older, growing up
5. A tender and gentle little birthday party with the people who brought me into this world, the people whom I brought into this world, and Jon Weaver-Kreider.
May we walk in Beauty. Oh, so much, so much Beauty!
Phoenix
Gratitude List:
1. All those naked ladies tiptoeing through people’s gardens right now.
2. Katydids
3. Friends who take care of me. Thanks, Nancy and Abigail!
4. Mosquitoes. Okay, not really. But think of all the wonderful people they feed! Bats and swifts and swallows and. . . So yes, mosquitoes.
5. Night sounds of August
6. Growing older, growing up
May we walk in Beauty!
I used to tie myself in knots with finding the perfect word or phrase for a poem, working and reworking ideas and sounds until things began to sound like something manufactured in a plastics factory. Then, in November, when I decided I needed to loosen up or let my Poet die a quiet death, I found myself spewing random verbiage all over the place. This was a good thing: my Poet survived.
Lately, the pendulum has begun to swing back again. I don’t plan to let myself get knotted into that editorial straitjacket, but I do want to add a little more deliberation to my poetry again. Here is a revision I worked up on my July first poem. It’s not significantly different; the biggest change is in the line breaks. I wanted to create more intention to the rhythm of the lines, with a sudden shift in the final stanza. I think it works. I’d be glad of any feedback you have about the differences between the poems.
These are the Days
These are the days when I become
a quiet rock, a quivering leaf,
an ear of lichen listening to the stones grow.
The words have wandered off on tiptoe,
eloquence eludes me, and all my sentences
begin with the word So.
So the wind will sing in my sun-rimed feathers
but my own story waits like a seed in the earth,
like a dream that must rise through mud, a bubble,
the nymph of a damselfly crawling through centuries
up the stalk of a smooth green reed
to be born to the clear blue light.
There is a roaring in my ears
like the sound of a newborn grief or rage.
But it’s only the lazy hum of summer,
of fireflies clicking their aching rhythms
into the velvet indigo of solstice,
communing with the waxing moon.
Another day I’ll dawn,
but for now I will sink
slowly into the pond
with Grandmother Moon
and leave my message with the fish.
Gratitude List:
1. Variety
2. Revision
3. Sweaters and scarves in August
4. Balance
5. Partnership
May we walk in beauty.
Mockingbird Says:
“Protect your nestlings with every ounce of courage and ferocity you can muster. Whether it be Monsanto or a kitty cat, zip in in a whir of flashy feathers and nip them on the nether regions–just like this! Aha!”
–Oh, Mockingbird! Yes. I do get your point, and so, unfortunately, does little Miss Winky. Poor Kitty Cat.
Gratitude List (the typical 5, plus a few bonus from an amazing weekend with my gang of college friends and their children):
1. Lasting friendships, powerful in their intentionality and their serendipity
2. Scott’s rock and sand collection
3. Awakeners
4. A happy gang of kids, riding bikes, playing games, swimming, giggling, sharing jokes. . .
5. Being part of the cold and broken hallelujah (Leonard Cohen)
6. Late late night conversations around the fire, sharing the bitter/sweets
7. Walking out of the labyrinth
8. This moment: We were sitting around in the shade yesterday morning discussing shame and the impact it has on our parenting, and how it is used in schools. Before long three of the children had gathered with us in the circle, and they started telling us their own ideas about effective and ineffective behavior management in school, about what seems fair and right and what is a violation of their sense of self.
9. Taking pictures of the fire with Luke
10. Africa House, where we stayed
May all beings be blessed.
Mockingbird says:
“Listen well, and your own speech will be enriched.”
Gratitude List:
1. The trees, those people who grasp the Earth between their toes and grow down toward the heart of the mother, who dream their leaves and needles and nuts and flowers and fruit into the air, who breathe for us.
2. The spiders, those people who fling themselves with abandon into the air and drift on their own silk to a new anchoring place, who make the connections, who spin and weave.
3. The birds, those feather people who dash from tree-branch to tree-branch or rest on a hammock of sky–treading wind currents, whose very speech is music, who range in size from the hummingbird smaller than my open hand to the eagle whose wingspan is greater than my own.
4. Margaret Atwood, who is tearing at my heart with her book, The Year of the Flood.
5. Fresh corn for supper tonight.
May we walk in Beauty.
Mockingbird Chronicles 