Gratitudes

Stones for Memory

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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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.

Following the Path of Grace

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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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!

Day After

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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

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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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!

Boiling Down

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Brewer suggests a simmer down poem today.  This may be more of an extended prose metaphor written in poetic form.

These are not the words she used,
but when you boil it down, it all came down
to: “Are you good enough, faithful enough,
like-me enough to be allowed here?”

And boil down it did.  Or up.
It boiled.  It takes a day at least
to bring that pot
to galloping roil.

And then the steam rises,
wraiths of steam,
curtains of steam
to shift the appearance of things.

***

I can’t seem to get to the simmer down part.  It seems to want to stay at a boil, and I want to get on with my day for now.  I have an itch to start it over, but there’s a small person here who wants me to read to him, and that takes precedence.

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If you look closely, you will see a shiny CD
that someone placed around a seedpod.
The mirror gives it a surreal look.

Gratitude List:
1. Long sleep
2. Cool November morning
3. Leaf-fall
4. Seed-fall
5. The cycle: That which dies will rise again.

May we walk in Beauty!

Whose Eyes?

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

 

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Robert Brewer suggests a “We’re Being Watched” Poem today:

When you walk in the fields,
when you wander in the woods–
sometimes you will feel it.

When you are looking closely
at the way the fern curls or
at the obscure twittering bird
hopping just out of sight
in a leafy bower or
at the way the ladybug
race-waddles around the tabletop,

when you are in the act of noticing
the way the minnows dart
in seemingly random chaos
before they form up
into an ordered school or
the way the sun illuminates
the golden of an autumn afternoon,
or the way one piece of quartz–
just one of thousands–
suddenly sparkles from the field row

Have you also noticed
that you are being noticed, too?
How the looking goes out
while drawing other looking in?
How the inner knowing eye
of all that is
is bent upon observing
the awe-inspiring creature
that is you?

 

Gratitude List:
1. The shining faces of those students last night after the play, thoughtfully and fervently discussing race and change, personal accountability, and the power of a good story to make us more deeply, compassionately human.  I am so proud to know them.
2. Story.  The power of story to bring us all to the table.
3. Grace.  Restoration.  Redemption.
4. Rose hips
5. Systems

May we walk in Beauty.

Once Upon a Time

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

I needed a little inspiration today, so I went to Robert Brewer’s Poetic Asides blog.  He suggests a Once Upon a Time poem.  As with so many of these speedy morning poems, I am not sure quite what is happening here, but I think this one may bear some revision.

Once upon a time, Child,
when you were caught in the fog–
remember how it held you, how it
caught at your arms and legs like brambles,
until you saw the rose bush
beside the path in the woods–

remember how the roses
dropped their tender petals on the ground,
how the center swelled
into those ripe red berries,
a little sharp, a little sweet,
and fed you, healed you–

remember how the bees
swarmed around you,
how you cried out in fear,
how the sun broke through the buzzing cloud
and all was golden,
all was sweetness–

remember how you heard the howling
off in the distance and closing in,
how the beast emerged from the wood,
all teeth and claw,
how you quelled the urge to run,
how you looked it in the eye
and said, “What is your name?”

I remember now,
how you walked that day
out of the mists,
a rose in your hair
and honey dripping
from your fingers.

 

Gratitude List:
1. Parent/Teacher Conferences this afternoon.  It is a change of pace, and a chance to talk about these wonderful people with others who understand just how much I like them.  I admit that there is some stress involved.  It’s a long time to be “on,” and I never know how the conversations will flow, and I don’t think I have enough time to get my room as tidy as I would like before they start coming–but I still look forward to this little chance to interact with the parents of my people.
2. Dawn
3. Breath
4. Kale
5. Poetry–especially that John O’Donohue poem that I am reading to myself every morning.

May we walk in Beauty!

How Do You Know?

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

How do you know,

when the River has told you
the stories of the ancestors,

that you will remember the tale
to tell to the wind,
after the snow has fallen,
after the grey fog has settled
deep into the valleys,

that you will remember the cadence
when the the small animals gather
to listen to you sing the River’s song,

that you will recall the bright watery threads
that weave through every story the River has told
since the beginning of time,
since the dawn of remembering?

Gratitude List:
1. The mist/fog yesterday morning that settled over the valley below Mt. Pisgah and above the River.  The highway skirted the edges of it for a time, and I would travel through patches of sunshine, with open space to one side and dense fog on the other.  At times the fog hovered above the road and pink shone through the layer of mist, so it looked like pink was caught on the underbelly of the fog, and it was difficult to determine the source of its illumination.
2. It happened again yesterday: I don’t often spend much thought on worrying about how I look, but occasionally the old voices pipe up: “Look at the frumpy teacher!”  On the very day that I have had such a thought (and I am very careful not to let personal things like that show in the classroom), there is always some girl who comes up and tells me she loves something about what I am wearing.  I used to think that teenage girls were like sharks–they could smell your discomfort with yourself a mile away, and they would circle in for the kill.  I now think that this was only my personal teenage self projecting my own anxiety onto others.  Still, I now think that they DO have radar.  They sense how and in what way you might need a boost, and they circle in and offer help.
3. I had an anxiety dream last night, and I managed to manipulate it to solve my problem.  So often I wake up from those feeling like I am at the mercy of the fates, but this morning, I feel like I have the tools to make my way through the things I was worried about.
4. The women who fought and protested to make it possible for women to vote.  “As we go marching, marching. . .”
5. I know I go on about this, but GOLDEN.  Everything is golden.
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May we walk in Beauty!

Reading Wisdom

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

sumac

Learn to tell the story of the red leaves against water.
Read the alphabet of walnut branches newly bared for winter.
Become literate in the language of cricket and of wren,
of the footsteps of skunk and the changeability of weather.

Interpret the text of the wind in the hollow.
Scan the documents of cloud and constellation.
Enter the tale of rose hip and nettle and sassafras.
Study Wisdom and she will find you.

(Proverbs 3:13-31)

Gratitude List:
1. Firelight
2. Recommitment to purpose
3. Circles
4. Doorways
5. The magic that is all around us.

Bright Blessings!