I had to rush around today to do some sudden work that came up, so I rushed the poem. The prompts are Anchor and Nature.
Anchored
by Beth Weaver-Kreider
feet bare on bare earth
breath in sync with breeze
heartbeat rhymes with
the beating heart of sycamore
on a breath send roots
down and down through
soil through loam around
stone around bone
anchor to the core
of the mother
Today’s Prompts were Social _____ and Touch:
Social Medium
by Beth Weaver-Kreider
Tendrils of thought whisper
through ether, through thin
air, through wires which fire
like synapses, brain waves.
The medium notices, raises
awareness, opens her notebook,
types in a rhythm, a patter
of notes, of letters on keyboards.
She knows the byways of
platforms and scaffolds in
digital apps and media, and
touches the stories of others
through digital narratives,
traces the pain she reads
back to its sources. She
wanders through doorways
of future possibilities, opens
new pathways for potential.
She sees you through the
mirror of your screen and
knows the appropriate
application to help you
find your direction.
The prompts today were Quirk and Earth–lovely little sound play there! This happened while I was out walking:
Sentience
by Beth Weaver-Kreider
What is this being human,
but the quirk of birth
into this form of organism
here on Earth? Are you
more person than the plants
who daily give you grateful breath,
receiving yours in sacred
reciprocity? Am I more being
than the stones made
of the minerals that map
my own bones and blood?
What is sentience,
but knowing oneself
within one’s place? And
that flat rock up on the hillside
does it with much more grace
than either you or I.
Rocks and rivers, ibises
and spiders, fish and fox—
all inhabit their beingness
with as much instinct and
awareness as you or I
could hope to muster.
What is the human drive
to settle always at the top,
to strive for dominance,
defining us as something
always more complete,
more comprehensive,
more masterfully apt,
than ape or aster?
Hasn’t this been the root
of our disaster, the lines
we draw between ourselves
and the living, breathing
world around us? Thus
we place ourselves
outside of place, when we refuse
to acknowledge other knowing,
other forms of growing
into personhood and being.
Better we should recognize
the neighborhood of beings
who surround us, each
with their own song and story,
each with their own wisdom,
if we knew only how to notice.
Today’s prompts were Galaxy (or galaxy-type things) and love/anti-love:
Sometimes
by Beth Weaver-Kreider
Sometimes when I say
I am seeking the Beloved,
it is your wise eyes I see,
your expectant face, your
eloquent and tender hands.
Sometimes when I listen
for the humming of the stars,
it’s your voice my ears remember,
your quiet murmur, your
trilling whistle, clear and bright.
Sometimes when I pause
in the middle of the trail
and catch the aroma of lilac
or hyacinth sifting into the clearing,
it’s your scent I’m sensing,
and I am held in your arms
as surely as if you were here.
In honor of Earth Day tomorrow, I have recorded Jane Yolen’s “Earth Day.”
Today’s Prompts are Isolation, and Seven Sins.
Isolation and the Seven Sins
by Beth Weaver-Kreider
The first one is coughing, right?
Or. . .coughing without covering your mouth,
or coughing into your hand instead of your elbow.
Does sneezing belong here, too,
or is it just a matter of degree:
an uncovered cough goes ten feet
while a sneeze blasts twenty-seven.
The second is touching your face.
Don’t touch your face!
Don’t scratch your nose!
Don’t rub your eyes!
Then there’s forgetting
to wash your hands,
or not using soap,
or not singing Happy Birthday
twice through while you wash.
I’m having a whole lot of birthdays lately.
Getting too close to people
who don’t live in your house,
that’s the fourth one—
sidling up to strangers in stores,
saying, “Is this the line?”
while they edge away
from you as politely as they dare.
Three more? Okay. Here’s one:
Not wearing a mask in public.
Don’t go to the bank
unless you look you’re
going to rob the bank.
You’ve got to learn
how to smile with your eyes.
Number six is definitely hoarding.
Nobody needs that much toilet paper, hon.
And the seventh. Sloth? Is that one?
I’m pretty sure I heard that one,
but maybe that’s a deadly sin.
Aren’t these deadly sins, too?
One of today’s Prompts is Month. The other is to use these six words in a sentence: bump, embrace, fixture, howl, lonely, resolve (all created by Shakespeare).
Song for a New Way
a sestina of Shakespearean words
by Beth Weaver-Kreider
Coyote is something of a fixture
in the myth of the landscape, a lonely
figure trotting atop the ridge. A howl
echoes into the hollow, an embrace
of wildness and winsome, where we bump
against our own internal resolve
to enter wildness, our stout resolve
to live less burdened by the fixtures
of modern existence, in the bump
and whirl of the rat race, this lonely
place in the crowd. Today we embrace
our freedom from form with a wild howl.
Set free from the commute, the howl
of the markets that weakened our resolve
to fight the forces that tempted us to embrace
acquisition and consumerism, that fixture
of capitalism that is the root of our lonely
longing for stuff that stops us, a bump
on the road to enlightenment. We bump
into the stuff, the stuff, the stuff. We howl
with the frustration, knowing we’d be less lonely
if we could only find our inner resolve
and let our inner existence be the fixture
that would lead us to a stronger embrace
of what matters. For example, we would embrace
kindness and empathy, the places where we bump
against each other would be the fixture
of our ideals. We’d learn to how to howl
our deep longings and we would resolve
to make each other less lonely.
Only in the search for connection will our lonely
lust for power be ended. When we embrace
all beings as siblings, and resolve
to avoid the stumble and bump
of collecting more trophies. The howl
of lost enchantment no longer a fixture.
We can resolve that we will no longer be lonely.
The fixture of our new story will be the embrace.
We’ll bump fists and hips, and howl.
Today’s poem prompts were “train” and “message.” I was wandering through the long grasses of the long A sound in train, and ended up at the Amazingville Station. One day, years ago, when the poetry was so heady and giddy I could hardly keep from floating away, someone wrote on someone else’s poem, “You are sleeping with everyone in Amazingville,” and Mara wrote a poem beginning with that phrase. I have wanted so terribly to travel again to Amazingville, so I figured out today that perhaps you need to take the train.
Someone in one of my groups said he likes this poem, but he doesn’t really understand it, which it exactly how I feel, too. I responded with this, and maybe it makes a little more sense to me now: “I’m not sure I understand it, actually. My seven and seven is the final two lines that turn the haiku to tanka, so the haiku is perhaps a summoning spell, a way to bring me back to Amazingville, too, and I will finish the incantation with my two lines of sevens.”
Here’s the weirdness, and then a video of last year’s Easter Magdalene poem:
Taking the Train to Amazingville
by Beth Weaver-Kreider
When you get off the train at Amazingville Station,
send me a message that you have arrived.
Make it a five seven five, American haiku,
and let the cutting word be one that sets me free.
Then bring me around with the sweet music,
the alluring scent of your season word.
Call me home with haiku and I’ll come to you
on the next train, with my seven and seven.
Today’s Prompts were Spider and Exotic. I don’t know if re-mything Spider Mystery is exotic or not, but this is what I came up with.
Spider
by Beth Weaver-Kreider
Not all stories start the same.
Try this one:
In the ending. . .
We’re bending the tale
around a whole new fulcrum,
following Hansl’s trail of crumbs
from wicked witch to angry stepmother,
or over other paths not yet traversed
within the standard myth.
In the ending was Spider,
marking her eternal spiral,
spinning her infinite web,
wrapping her magical bundles
(don’t become one of those).
You wonder how she got to this moment,
your mind on the lines that connect
from beam to sill, from ledge to beam again.
You want to know the structure,
sense the essence of the plot,
the way from there to here.
But when you live within the spin of infinity,
beginnings become irrelevant.
Endings, too, for that matter, fade
to insignificance. The middle,
that’s the place where twist and whirl
tingle, where living blossoms
out of nothing, and you catch
the sticky thread of the moment,
knowing you can shift from
arm to arm of time, like Spider,
who even now is watching you
from the center of her web.
In the middle. . .
Now there’s a thread
to hand a tale by.
The prompts today are “bar” and “The Last _______.” Yesterday, I was mulling what the lore of these days might be, and the word Apocalypticon floated through my brain. It turns out there’s already a book by that name, but I thought it might be a good name for a poem.
The Apocalypticon: The Last Revelation
by Beth Weaver-Kreider
One
That spring, Grace found her first morel
on the west-facing slope of the ridge.
Everyone was finding them, actually,
that spring. Everyone was eating morels,
and Emily planted a gangster garden.
Bootleggers and mob bosses graced
her green. All we had seen before
was somehow new now, more verdant.
Two
One of us began receiving messages
from a golden koi who circled slowly
beneath the lilies of a lake. She would not
tell us what the Lady told her, only:
“Take what you need. Too much is at stake.”
Three
I did battle with poison ivy that spring,
apologizing a hundred times a day
for cutting her thousand arms, but
ivy laughed in crimson leaves and
grew like the Revolution was at hand.
Four
Some of us sat with our demons,
telling old tales of battles long gone,
bellying up to the bar of lost memories,
or singing them to sleep with old songs,
while Clare chanted exorcisms
in the sleet on windy mountains
pushing back the forces that threaten
to submerge the story. I know
of two who nearly lost the trail,
wandering far into the shadows.
Five
We stopped using the word normal,
re-wove older linguistic threads, spun
ancient stories into the chapters
we were writing. We re-worded our
vocabularies, re-ordered our syntax,
re-discovered voices we thought
had forgotten how to speak.
Six
We caught our own flocks of wild yeast,
planted potatoes in neat rows,
learned new words for magic and
for prayer, exploring layer after layer
of mysteries, parting the curtains,
and watching the ways of the moon.
The grumbling is getting louder. The anxiety is rising. People are starting to toss the words “rights” and “freedom” around. People are afraid that this is all power-plays by the leadership to cow us, subject us, hold us in our places. And why shouldn’t they be afraid? When have we ever known the (mostly) rich (mostly) white (mostly) male ruling class to work on behalf of the people, to remember their sweetly quaint little title of “public servant”? Who should we trust?
The doctors. And scientists. We can, hopefully, trust the scientists and the physicians. And the story. Trust the story. Watch how it has played out across the globe. Remember Italy. Remember China.
It’s very likely that some of the governors are working out of self-interest and electability, that some are too cautious and timid, that others are hungrily consolidating power in a time when people are vulnerable. So I will trust the leaders who seem to be trusting the doctors and the scientists and the story. It hasn’t been difficult to find an example of a leaders who isn’t trusting the science, who is inexorably manipulating the narrative to feed his own ego and his own power. And if you want to start talking about freedom and rights, let’s begin with the ways in which he has been harming the freedom and the rights of the common people since the day he took office. I’m going to cast my lot in with the governors on this one.
This doesn’t have to be an American frontier epic contest between your fear and your freedom. That’s an old and worn-out trope, and it’s a false dichotomy, a fairy tale told to us by end-stage capitalism. The governors are not Big Bart riding into town with all guns blazing, ordering the women and children to cower in their homes. In this story, we make the choice to stay home, to wait, to isolate, in order to protect the vulnerable ones among us, in order to protect our health care workers.
As far as I know, my parents and my immuno-compromised beloveds are all safe. But if we resume business as usual too soon, they may all be in danger, and those you love, too. It’s not about whether or not you or I personally fear death. It’s about whether we have the deep communal compassion to do something that protects the most vulnerable among us. Remember, this is the Exile for the Good of the Realm.
Gratitude List:
1. The Iron Lady Trail. My Project Manager says I shouldn’t call it that, that it’s still unnamed, but he initially called it the Iron Lady, and so I’m calling it that for now. Josiah is marking and clearing a series of deer trails in the woods above the pond. He calls himself the Project Manager, and her has enlisted his progenitors to assist with the cutting of poison ivy and brambles. Yesterday after our schoolwork, we cleared a side trail that links the Iron Lady (I mean Unnamed) Trail to a second entrance to the fields. This one emerges from the woods beneath a curving limb of a cherry tree. For too long, the poison ivy has kept us out of the woods. We are going to try to keep the trails maintained so we can have some passages through the woods.
2. The passion with which my kids follow their interests. It can be tiring to listen to hours of discourse on the minute differences between the Tesla models, or how to build a very detailed something-or-other in Minecraft, or the many reasons why a particularly obscure piece of technology is either illegal or shady or brilliant. Still, I love that they can be passionate about things that have near-zero interest for me.
3. Homemade oatmeal protein bars. I don’t know why I got away from making them. And of course, I have no recipe, so I have to go back and recreate it. The ones I made last night are too crumbly. But they taste good!
4. The veils of green appearing through the woods.
5. I am loving the poetry-writing process right now. It’s very much like the energy of April 2012 (I think that was the year), when I felt something click and sizzle. This is perhaps less giddy, more grounded, but it tingles. I’m especially grateful for my poet-community right now.
Take care of each other. Walk in Beauty!
The Soul, it sees by synesthesia
Tasting light caressed by song
A touch is like a descant fire
resonant and strong.
—Craig Sottolano
“I’m not as cooperative as you might want a woman to be.” —Carrie Fisher
“The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.” —Adrienne Rich
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
-—Raymond Carver’s Late Fragment, inscribed on his tombstone
Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into
the conversation.
The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last.
All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.
—David Whyte
“Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.”
―Mother Teresa
“Walking. I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.”
―Linda Hogan
“This will be our reply to violence:
to make music more intensely,
more beautifully,
more devotedly than ever before.”
―Leonard Bernstein
Mockingbird Chronicles 