Poems

Swimming in Semiotics

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Love is Stronger

From the Facebook Page of Mykal Slack.

Poem for today and for yesterday:

Oh give me the words
to make a gentle nest–words
that harbor and heal.

Gratitude List:
1. Words.  Metonymics, semiotics, heteroglossia, chronotope. . .  I am at a Teachers as Scholars conference at Messiah College.  Loving the words.
2. Two crows conferring in a yellow field
3. The perfect V of geese along the highway
4. The helpers.  Look for the helpers, says Mr. Rogers
5. All the healing things: words, laughter, hugs, glances, touch

May we walk in Beauty!

Watching and Being Watched

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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I came across these old photos yesterday, three random photos of different years tucked together into an envelope. Top: 2000, Middle: 2014, Bottom: 2006 (Bumblebee boots).

Day 4 of All the Things I Wish I Had Said (While You Were Still Here)
The Prompt is to write a couplet.  I am balking, but perhaps I should try.
***
Like a great oak tree, within your leafy heart
I see how you protectively conceal
your secret griefs. You stand apart
and only partially reveal

the aches and losses that have brought you low.
Be strong, my friend.  Some day you’ll let them go.
***

It’s hard to put things into rhyme, but satisfying, too.  I couldn’t find my way to a couplet until I hit those last two lines, and I feel as though the poem sounds more like an accusation than it is intended.  It is meant to be simply a way of saying, “I see that you are carrying your past pain with great determination.”  At first, I typed: “the aches and losses that have brought you down. / You wear them like a martyr’s crown,” which I think is poetically stronger than this, but it didn’t say what I wanted to say at all.

I want to keep working with couplets and rhymes.  I do not usually actively rhyme in my poetry, but I try to pay attention to the internal assonance and consonance within the lines, and trying to form a poem around a rhyme is a helpful exercise. I think it opens new processing pathways in the brain.

Gratitude List:
1. (Who did you see?) That soft-eyed curious doe who stood on Oriole Bluff behind the house and watched us watching her through the dining room window.  We did not climb the hill to see, but I have a hunch that she may have hidden a dappled child of shadow in the tall grasses up there.
2. (What was magical?) Fireflies like sparks, like stars, twinkling all around us.
3. (What was satisfying?) Making fire with the children, roasting marshmallows and hot dogs.  (This was the first that I have really craved meat in the past year, but Jon had bought some vegetarian “sausages” that were mostly sufficient to the moment.)
4. (What is energizing?) I will be finished with my grading by the evening.  It was hard, so hard, to get into it yesterday, and I fought it off by organizing papers and stacks from the year.  And now, those stacks are organized, and I am also almost finished with the grades.
5. (What do you anticipate?) Continuing to find the rhythms of summer.  I have a Teachers as Scholars seminar at Messiah College this week, so I cannot quite set up the new patterns, but I want to give parts of each day to preparing for the fall and to working on some writing projects.

May we walk in Beauty!

The Doorway Out is the Doorway In

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Sato Masahiro Q-ta
Collage by Sato Masahiro, also known as Q-ta.

Today’s poem is to be an ekphrastic poem.  I love the play between word and image.  For the image, I found a perfect collage by Q-ta. I think I will try to work on my own collage techniques this summer.

Day 3 of All the Things I Wish I Had Said (While You Were Still Here)

The Doorway Out is the Doorway In

You will come to many doorways.
Seek the ones that open inward,
the ones that take you in and down.

Always seek the road with wonder
in your heart, in your hands. Wander
freely through the hallways and the tunnels.

Be both polite and firm with everyone
that you encounter. Within these passages,
they will be mirrors and reflections.

Look for the landmarks, the shining pebbles
that glow in the darkness, the typical turns
that remind you of turns you have taken before.

Stay with the story as it unfolds within you,
finding new doorways and passages inward.
Make up new words for the forces you find.

Do not be frightened of losing your way.
Getting lost here is the way to be found.
The doorway is out is the doorway in.

Gratitude List:
1. Time: Keeping time, watching time, measuring time, how the concept of time is bound up with the concept of space
2. History: How a place gathers its history around it–that way people do, too, taking on the aura and the shape of what has been
3. Conductors and Historians: People who search out the stories and keep track of the past, who share it eagerly.  When the Columbia Trolley stopped yesterday to pick us up, I had a sudden odd and delightful sense that we were prey and the historians on the trolley were hunters, happy to have new people to tell the stories to.  We happily obliged.
4. Endings, which carry in them the seeds of new beginnings
5. Beginnings

May we walk in Beauty!

All the Things I Wish I Had Said

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ZOE_0001

I am using the Curtis Memorial Library Prompt List for a series of morning exercises.  After yesterday’s Abecedarian poem, I began thinking about how I wish I could have given it to some of my students this past semester.  I think the next set of poems I am writing might be:
All the Things I Wish I Had Said (While You Were Still Here)

Courage
An Acrostic Poem

Can you feel how it fills you
once you offer it that space
underneath your ribs?
Remember: You can do this.
After all you have been through,
give yourself this breath, and this one.
Each one will offer you space for another.

Gratitude List:
1. (What gives you strength?) Finding new summer rhythms–more writing, more reading, more yoga.
2. (What opens your heart?) The way that people listen to each other
3. (What refuels you?) Sleep–the summer sleep is returning
4. (What gives you energy?) A clean house
5. (What makes you more completely human?) Stories

May we walk in Beauty!

Abecedarian

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house

An Abecedarian Poem
for some young people I know

Always give Love the last word: You
belong here, you have a place here.
Carry that awareness inside,
deep within you, where you cannot
evade its holy truth. You were
formed for this world, for this moment.

Go, yes, into all the world, and
hold out your hands. Share that good news
in every place that you enter.
Jump with both feet into your life,
keeping hold of this, your mantra:
Love will always have the last word.

Maybe you struggle to hold on.
No one seems to understand you,
or it all seems futile.  Be the
person that you have been needing.
Question authority, yes, but
resist the pull of destruction.

Sometimes it will seem that you are
the only one who lives by Love.
Understand this: You’re not alone.
Voice your anxieties and pain.
Walk openly. You cannot be
x’ed out or erased.  You belong.

You have a role to play, full of
zeal. Let love have the final word.

Gratitude List:
1. Morning yoga, which is to say
2. stretching myself into new ways of thinking and being, which is to say
3. growing and transforming, which is to say
4. giving up old forms that no longer serve, which is to say
5. morning has arrived with such shine, such vigor.

May we walk in Love.

Somewhere in the World

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IMG_20160530_112438149
Shere Khan of Skunk Hollow (we watched  The Jungle Book last night)

Somewhere in the world
there must be a house
where you will find safety,
a place where maybe
you will find the grace of wholeness.

Somewhere in the world
there must be a word
that holds your truest name,
a word that is a haven,
a shelter for your aching.

Somewhere in the world
there must be a table
set for soothing, set for aiding,
a table that will make
a new way for your healing.

Gratitude List:
1. Dreams
2. Metaphors
3. Symbols
4. Poems
5. Laughter

May we walk in Beauty!

Grandmother’s Roots

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IMG_20160530_110821693
the peonies have
finally awakened in
the doorway of June
transient blooms and roots that
come from grandmother’s garden

Examen and Gratitude:
1. (Who inspires you?) Harriet Tubman.  Today, I finish my mini-course with my students at the River.  We will talk of dreams and water, of the Underground Railroad that traveled up this River, the walk to freedom.  And I will tell them of the Dreamer, Harriet Tubman–legend says that sometimes she would suddenly fall asleep at really dangerous moments on the journey northward, but when she awoke, she would know the next way to go.
2. (What makes you glad?) Sun on the wing of the red-winged blackbird.
3. (What fills you with deep joy?) The inclusive laughter of teenagers, the way they perform for each other to make each other laugh, the way the laughter catches from one to another and on down the line like a wildfire.
4. (What is your hunger?) For solitude, for silence, for deep quiet.  Even in the midst of loving these last days with my young people, part of me is turning toward the quiet of summer and the deliberate pacing of the long days.
5. (What wakes you up and calls you forward?) Trying on new ways to use words, reading poets who break up language and use it like mosaic and collage artists use broken bits of glass and pieces of paper.

May we walk in Beauty!

Ideas Catch Fire

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DSCN9282
Planting spring flowers

Gratitude Tanka:
1. Ideas catch fire,
2. fueling the work of the day,
3. lending a focus,
4. bringing order from chaos,
5. shaping the coming story.

May we walk in Beauty!

Only Love Will Guide You

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

DSCN8162

There is no other answer.
Not purity.
Not righteousness.
Not power.
Not rules.

No book or map.
No speaker.
No leader.
No thing you can buy.
No magic elixir.

Only love will guide you in the end.

Gratitude List:
1. (What do you hear?) Wren calling, coffee bubbling, cat purring, child playing with gnomes
2. (What do you see?) Green, rain, orange fur, deep shadow, reflections
3. (What do you smell?) Clean clear air, earth after rain, coffee
4. (What do you feel?) Chill on my skin, dampness of air, morning aches, tickle in my nose
5. (What do you remember?) Birds in the rain, nap with a warm cat, laughing children, chocolate bar

For all these I am grateful.  May we walk in Beauty!

You Are the Dragon, You Are the Cave

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

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The thing you learn, of course,
before you strap your sword belt on,
is that the princess you pledged to save
is only yourself in another guise,
that the dragon you swore to smite
is simply your own roaring ego
belching flame in the mouth of the cave.

You are the villagers rioting in the streets,
and calling for the dragon’s blood.
You are the bells that pealed from the towers
when the dragon circled above the town.
You are the sword,
the shield, the very cave,
the small frightened mouse
trampled in the fray.
You are the village.
You are the mountain.
You are the day itself,
quiet witness to the story.

Gratitude List:
1. Compassion
2. Nettles
3. The color orange
4. Routine.  Breaking routine.
5. Clear vision

May we walk in Beauty!