Poems

Strain Train Rain

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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“The courageous don’t lose their fear. They simply transform it.” –Climbing Poetry

Here’s a poetic form I found on Robert Lee Brewer’s “Poetic Asides” blog. It’s called diminishing verse. The poem is in three-line stanzas with no rules about syllables or metric feet. You choose an ending word that is able to be diminished from the front, one letter or sound at a time. I am going to try strain-train-rain and see what happens:

For ten long weeks, we have felt the strain,
each thirsty day arriving like a dry and dusty train,
but finally–this dawning brings us rain.

There are some interesting possibilities here. I would like to try some with line endings where the thought continues on to the next line.  Strip-trip-rip might be an interesting one to play with. (The str- word-opening is a good one to use because of the series of three initial consonants.)  Cram-ram-am. It’s a fun little game just to make up the word series. I might enlist my children to help me with that part.

Gratitude List:
1. Kate Dicamillo, writer of short-chapter easy-read children’s books. My boys and I have been reading them this week. We have always liked her Mercy Watson books, but she has taken three characters from Mercy Watson’s stories and given them stories of their own. Leroy Ninker Saddles Up, Francine Poulet Meets the Ghost Raccoon,  and my favorite, Where Are You Going, Baby Lincoln? They are lovely parables for adults as well as for children.
2. Someone once suggested politely that I should not put coffee on my gratitude lists because it is a drug, an artificial stimulant. But of course, I will put on my list whatever I please, and while I recognize its addictive effects on my body and brain, I am really grateful this morning for coffee because of a tossandturn night. For three mornings running, I woke up at 4:44 on the dot. I took my body in hand last night and told it that it had to wait until after 5 to wake up. It could even have a four if it wanted to and wake up at 5:24. Perhaps it panicked–I woke up repeatedly throughout the night, and I am supremely grateful for coffee this morning to set me on the path to wakefulness.
3. Deep breaths. Another good waker-upper.
4. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. It could rain for days now, and I would be happy. My classroom is a pleasant temperature. The air feels clear and fresh. The gentle sounds of rain are soothing. The land is sighing in relief.
5. The open-heartedness of young people.

May we walk in Beauty!

Goldenrod and History

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

lizzie
It has been a least a couple weeks since I have posted a purple lisianthus. I love the complementary colors–purple and gold–pulsing there beside each other.

Here is a poem I wrote last November.

Waiting for History to Repeat Herself
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

Waiting for History to repeat herself
is turning me into a statue of salt.

She sits next to me in the cafe,
stirs a load of sugar into her brew:
“It takes the edge off the inevitability,”
she tells me. “Inevitability is bitter, Girl.
It twists my gut into knots.”

She pours the cream,
sloshing it all over the counter,
and grabs a scone from her plate.
Her elbow sends the coffee mug
careening to the counter’s edge.

“I knew that would happen,”
she says, waving her butter knife
a little too close to my face.

I want to grab her, yell,
“Slow down a minute, Hon.
Relax. Take your time to settle in.
Concentrate on what you’re doing
right here in this moment,”

but she seems to be reading my mind.
“Impossible,” she blurts,
scattering crumbs across the counter top.
A dollop of jelly plops off her scone
and into her coffee. “I can’t slow down,
can’t settle, can’t give you time
to catch your breath on this one, Babe.”

Outside, snow curls out of the mist,
and voices call out sharply.
I’ve heard them all before:
Protect the Fatherland.
Eliminate the immigrants.
This is the time to show our
strength, to flex our iron arm.
Be very afraid.

“It’s beginning,” says History,
one elbow in the puddle of coffee,
the other in the wayward jam.
“I’ve heard it all before, Girl.
It’s the same damn grind,
over and over again.”

I sip my coffee black.
“Inevitability, Sister.”
She draws out the syllables
and hands me the cream.

Gratitude List:
1. Goldenrod! Have I said goldenrod? It’s everywhere now, and it shines. How it shines.
2. Those sunrises that seem to cover the whole spectrum of color
3. Commiseration.
4. Father Serafim and his choir of Assyrian singers
5. Goldenrod. I think the fairies live in patches of goldenrod.

May we walk in Beauty!

Open Heart

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

imag1867
Last week, we met this teeny tiny turtle–a snapper the size of a half dollar–on the sidewalk into the school. We set him in the grass where he would be safer from the many feet that would be thundering through during the coming day.

“It can hurt to go through life with your heart open, but not as much as it does to go through life with your heart closed.” –Jim Doty

The bud always opens toward decay,
toward falling, the fragile bits within
slipping off their tiny moorings,
sifting downward, petals drooping,
dropping to the ground below,
offering beauty and a lingering aroma
in the briefest span.

The bud which never opens
also lives toward decay and rot
but never senses sun-warm petals,
never knows the draw of butterfly,
the tickle of the bee, never feels
the moment of release, of
settling to earth.

Gratitude List:
1. Teeny tiny turtles
2. Having enough: enough sleep, enough love, enough time, enough of what we need to get by.
3. Spoken word poetry–always inspiring
4. Crickets, heartbeats
5. Believing in the good

May we walk in Beauty!

Sun and Sunflowers

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

sun-and-flowers

This river keeps rolling
rushing beneath me
even when my small boat
rests still on the water
quiet and open

Gratitude List:
1. Good Parenting is alive and well. Yesterday at Hersheypark, in the claustrophobic middle of the masses, where exhausted, grouchy parents are trying to deal with exhausted, grouchy children, I did not expect to so consistently witness such tender and attentive parenting. The whole point of going to an amusement part as a family is to have fun together, and mostly I saw adults eagerly sharing and creating a fun experience for their children.
2. Watching a child conquer his fears by going on a slightly scary roller coaster. “Let’s do that one again!”
3. Oak and sycamore and larch. The beautiful old trees at the park.
4. Seeing the world from high above. Perspective.
5. Doing the inner work. There is always a new challenge, a new practice, a new perspective to incorporate.

May we walk in Beauty!

Where Does Coyote Go?

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

chicken-of-the-woods
Hen of the Woods, Halifax,PA. Altered by Dreamscope.

Where does coyote go to rest in these hills and mountains
cross-hatched by houses and fields of corn and soy?
Where does he lay his head? Where does vixen raise her family?
Where does she hide her young ones?
Where do they find a patch of sun to play in?

Coyote brought us losses. We breathe a sigh in memory
of the soft feathers and sweet cluckings of our little flock.
Perhaps we drew him here with hens, and when they were spent,
he stayed on for fatty groundhog and the tenderness of rabbit.
An we breathe a sigh of gratitude for that.
If only now he brought us rain.

(I’m not sure quite what that is–I think it might work better in a prosey form, but I have become accustomed to lining out my thoughts like poems, considering where I want to breathe in the spaces of the phrase.)

Gratitude List:
1. Sleeping until just minutes before the alarm went off. I think I must have slept even more deeply last night.
2. Watching my children grow and learn and become themselves. Sometimes when they start to talk about what they are learning or thinking about, I find myself watching them from outside myself, marveling at these creatures that I know so intimately and that I do not know at all. Where have they come from?
3. My colleagues. Yesterday after a meeting about our accreditation process, one of the other teachers said to me that he found it interesting that no one in the meeting seemed discouraged or frustrated. Anyone can tell you that the beginning of an accreditation process can seem daunting at best. But he was right–the team seemed cheerful and eager. The administrative folks who are holding us through this and guiding the process are walking with us and brainstorming ways to streamline the process even as we take it seriously and fulfill the work of it thoroughly.
4. This steely grey moment before dawn bounds over the hill, when everything gets just a little quieter, even the crickets, and the trees are silhouetted against the sky.
5. My Book of Days (it sounds better than “bullet journal”) Fishing around inside myself for that fifth point, I keep circling around to my little daybook again, abandoning it because I wrote about it a couple days ago, and picking it up again. I have always had a sort of anxious relationship to calendar-keeping, finding it difficult to conceptualize future time, struggling to commit to future dates because the future is so fluid and I don’t want to nail it down. Somehow the little system that I have begun to use in the last week has helped me to visualize and conceptualize the framework of the future. I feel like I have organized the garage.

May we walk in Beauty!

Limber

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

imag1908
Becoming. . .

Several years ago in mid-September, I was sitting in the parking lot at Temple Beth Israel with boxes of vegetables for our CSA pick-up. During the hour and a half that I was there, at least thirty monarchs floated southward above my head. Like the birds and the dragonflies, monarchs are migrating now, too.

We used to go to the beach at this time of year, when most people have gone home for the summer. No crowds to get in the way–only warm water, cool breezes, and all the wingfolk flying south: flocks of a thousand swallows, and dragonflies and monarchs. The Wetlands Institute at Stone Harbor, NJ has a Monarch Migration Festival every September.

It’s the hummingbirds and the monarchs that really get me, such tiny and vulnerable little bodies sailing out over the Gulf to Mexico, to South America.  Dragonflies look like little machines, like helicopters built for the distance, but even they are vulnerable to weather, far out over the Gulf.

Now is the season for refueling, preparing for the leap into the blue, water and air. What will I risk in this space of my life? What void will you leap into?  Like those orange butterflies, we can trust that the long journeys of the past and the knowledge of the ancestors that lives in our own wings will inform our own flight.

Orange wings dip in farewell–
monarch catches a breeze
and wings toward the Gulf.

(I don’t really have a seasonal word as such in this haiku, but the second part of it is about the migration, so that gives the clue.)

Gratitude List:
1. Limber. Jon used this word yesterday to express something to do with fluid thinking. I like that word, especially as I am more and more aware of how the aging process demands more focused work on keeping the body limber. I like to think that my mind can also be limber if I keep it exercised.
2. Clouds: In yesterday’s sunrise, the clouds were first tangerine and indigo. Magenta. Then ivory and indigo and gold against a Maryblue sky. Clouds of mist hung low over the fields, pooling around the ankles of the cows. Clouds hung low over the River. Layers of clouds filled the sky.
3. Monarchs. Yesterday I took a walk and found four large caterpillars munching on milkweed behind the greenhouse. Eat well, little ones.
4. Janelle’s bees. The Middle School Science room has a hive right in the room. The Queen was quietly holding court, the larvae were squirming to get out of their little chambers, and the workers were dancing directions to each other.
5. This year’s Silhouette staff. That’s the school literary magazine. We had our first meeting yesterday, and they are so eager and willing to get right down to work. I think it’s going to be a really great year.

May we walk in Beauty!

Migration

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

featherleaf

As I think about constructing haiku, I think that perhaps the contemplative act of writing such a poem must include mulling throughout the day on the cutting word and the season word. If a poem hinges on two words, I think great care must be taken in the choosing of the words, like the process of creating a gratitude list–it becomes part of the day’s work: finding the gratitudes, finding the cutting and season words.  Distance is today’s cutting word, and migrating is for the season.

delicate orange wings
float across vast distance–
monarchs are migrating.

Gratitude List:
1. Boy doing spelling homework, putting the words in ABC order: “This is FUN!”
2. The satisfying glurg in the sink drain after I stuffed the baking soda down, poured in the vinegar, and capped the drain with a jar lid. Unclogged.
3. Yesterday’s sermon: quilting stories together with words. Find your stranger and tell your stories. Identify your commonalities and begin from there. Entertaining angels unawares.
4. Cool mornings. Have I mentioned how much I love cool mornings? How they invigorate and energize me?
5. Butterflies. Have you been seeing lots of monarchs too?  A couple weeks ago at the church picnic, they seemed to think that the children zooming down the water slide were flowers–one or two kept flitting around the action. There were several up at camp this past weekend as well.

May we walk in Beauty!

Gaga Ball

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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Woodland treasure

I want to keep practicing haiku, keeping in mind the concepts of the kigo  and kireji in the poem. It really shifts the brainwork and pondering to begin to imagine the poem more in terms of the two words or phrases that hold the “cutting” and the seasonality. Here is a helpful description, if you want to explore it, too.

a wren breaks the silence–
then returns to stillness
in the morning chill

Gratitude List:
1. Gaga Ball: Every muscle on my body aches today, but it was totally worth it. Between Gaga Ball, hiking, and swimming in really cold water with a kiddo who is just learning, I got a LOT of exercise yesterday. Gaga Ball is a great kids and adults game–surprisingly simple, but challenging. The adults have the advantage of strength, and the kids have the advantage of agility, so it plays to everyone’s strengths.
2. The fleecy patterns of clouds against blue sky last night just before the sun went down. Like a dream of a sky.
3. Thermal delight. I know it’s going to get hot again. I know it’s going to get cold. This weekend, however, has been just what a day should feel like–a little chilly around the edges and warm in the middle without going to any extremes.
4. Opportunities to practice. I have been spending time at the internet site “Abbey of the Arts,” and pondering their idea of being a monk in the world–living with that sort of intention. One of their principles is based on a Benedictine idea that I have been exploring this summer: Radical Hospitality. The more I explore the idea, the more I realize that it isn’t just about being with people, but about being with oneself as well, about welcoming in all the guests, as Rumi says–even the awkwardness, even the meanness. I kind of roared at the kids last night as they were escalating a conflict over back seat territory–how do I welcome that part of myself without judging it? ( I want to change that about myself, but I do think I need to welcome that part of me inside with joy and hospitality before I can really make a change.) I have a long way to go until I feel like this all comes easily for me, but every moment offers up an opportunity to practice.
5. My messy house. Yes, I get frustrated and ashamed about it. But looking around right now, I see so many centers of play and imagination where my children spend their time. Yes, we’ll clean and tidy the slate for them to start all over again–they need that, too. For now, though, I bless the messy spaces that hold their busy minds and hearts.

May we walk in Beauty!

Haiku: kigo and kireji

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

star
Reprising an old photo. 

Scholars of the old Japanese form of haiku seem to place less emphasis on exact syllable counts and more on the word-choice. I was reading this morning about kigo and kireji–the season word and the cutting word.

the little bowl is empty–
someone new is sipping
the August flowers

I think that the kireji is perhaps not supposed to be as obvious as the actual month name, but it seemed to add the the poignancy for me, though perhaps the name of the August flower would be appropriate.  Are there any flowers that bloom only in the late season? Somehow empty feels like an appropriate cutting word.

Gratitude List:
1. She made her first flight, although I did not witness. When I left for school meetings yesterday morning, Smallest Bird was sitting on the tiny twig right next to the nest, preening herself and looking proud and very brave. I stood a while and watched, but I was already later than I wanted to be, and I didn’t know if she was planning to take another minute or another two hours getting herself ready to fly. Safe journeys, Bright Bird!
2. Kyla made it through heart surgery without any apparent complications. She now has a Ventricular Assist Device which will help her heart to do its work. May her new heart come soon.
3. Yesterday’s anxieties look so much smaller in the light of a new day.
4. Little Cabin in the Woods with part of my beloved community.
5. I am going to go seek the labyrinth in the woods today.

May we walk in Beauty!

Making a Circle to Hold a Heart

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

heartstone
A safe circle for a heart.

Is it cold in the house of the hummingbird,
when raindrops patter softly on the sycamore leaf-roof,

when one small bird has dared the day,
flown upward through sunbeams,
trusting to wings insubstantial as mist?

The other no longer sits more quiet than breath,
but turns her head to the thunder,
hunkers deep into her mattress of cobweb,
waits for her moment to fledge.

Gratitude List:
1. One small hummingbird has dared the day and taken first flight. Safe journeys!
2. Anticipating a weekend and time with friends
3. My wise and earnest colleagues
4. A fine collection of Maine island stones, each with a single white line across, each one a little message about pathways, direction, and destiny, about joining up and making a way where none seems to be
5. English grammar. I happened upon a really fun sentence modeling exercise, which I did with a couple of classes yesterday. One student, who struggles to understand the structure of a complete simple sentence, read out the sentence he’d built, which included carefully placed adverbs and adjectives, two prepositional phrases, an appositive phrase, a subordinate clause, and three absolute phrases. He sounded so elegant and well-spoken, but most delightfully, he sounded proud of himself.  Here is an example of a sentence using all of those pieces: In the classroom, one laid-back teenager, a young man who often has no time for grammar, proudly read an elegant sentence from his writing journal as his delighted teacher listened, the words flowing like water, the ideas sparkling in the air, the class electrified by language.

May we walk in Beauty!