Poems

Poem a Day: 27

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today’s prompts were massive and road. I was watching the clouds on the way to do one final clean-up task in my classroom at school, and this poem spilled out.

Thunder and Her Children
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

When Thunder’s Children
walked the cloud-road
over the rim of the world,
massive mountains
arched their backs
to touch the children’s feet.

When the children
raced each other
back up the ribbons of sky
into the arms of their mother,
the earth sighed into hollows
and water pooled in the valleys.

WhenThunder sang
her sleepy brood to sleep,
trees sprang from the hillsides,
raising their joyful branches,
shaking their leafy crowns
and humming with her song.

And while the children slept,
Thunder curled herself around them,
and dreamed meadows into being,
and birds flying, and small animals
burrowing into the earth,
and all that is Became
while Thunder rested.

Poem a Day: 26

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today’s prompts are Noodle, and Change. I couldn’t figure out how to add the noodle. Maybe the poem itself is something if a noodle. . . .

Change Surreal
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

Step by step, prepare.
Spare a stare, don’t glare
but glance, this instance,
an instrument of intent,
bent on being, on seeing,
seeming seamless,
streaming, steeling
steady, ready for
reasons, for seasons.
The horizon not so horrible,
not the terrible terminal,
only an internal intersection,
new direction derelict.
Any edict an educated
editorial, tutorial surreal.
Real deal delivered.

Poem a Day: 25

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Today’s prompts were to write a poem that includes cloud words, and to do a re-mix of a poem from the month. I realized I have sort of been writing one long poem all month. Oy. I did a bit of a mash-up, and it holds together rather startlingly.

Re-Mix, With Clouds
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

It seems that
there is nothing now
that is not this:
the spiral unravels
the lions of jazz are dying
the World Snake sheds her skin
the tides turn
In the burning rooms of time,
we wait for the new world to appear.

Our feet take the rocky trail away from the village
to follow where blossoms may lead.
All we have seen before is somehow
new now, more verdant.
Fronds unfurl where dragonflies
hover above, large as dragons.
But I know of two who nearly lost the trail,
wandering far into the shadows.

Coyote is a fixture in the myth
of this lonely landscape. A howl
echoes within the embrace
of wildness and winsome, where we bump
against our own internal resolve

Plague Doctor! Plague Doctor!
Whither shall we wander?
Only to the garden gate—no further.
The egg and the seed are the medicine.
Grief is the egg of the moment,
just before you hear your name.

We’re trapped in the strata,
the cumulus, the haloed nimbus,
hallowed cumulostratus,
beneath the blue robes of the Beloved,
draped over us like a veil,
beneath Fortune’s shifting skirts:
like winter, she will come again,
trailing a net behind her
to rescue the words she has lost.
Could she have stayed within the boundaries?
She has folded her heart
into an origami bird, ready for flying.

We must relinquish our control.
This now is a narrowing funnel,
thinning the potent possibilities
to this stretched limbo of waiting.
I listen for your trilling whistle, clear and bright.

In the ending was Spider:
What has once been will be again.
Close the door on your way out.

Poem a Day: 24

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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

Poem a Day: 23

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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.

Poem a Day: 22

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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.

Poem a Day: 21

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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.”

Poem a Day: 20

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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?

Poem a Day: 19

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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.

Poem a Day: 18

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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.