Poems

Camels on the Brain

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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My brain is all a-fuzz this morning.  It wants to keep attaching itself to that image from my dream last night, the one that kept me sleeping through the four o’clock hour (finally), of a camel lying in the bed of a truck, wearing sunglasses.  But I don’t have that manic inner edge on this sleepy morning that would enable me to make such a surreal poem.  Why don’t you try that one?  (Edit: Okay, so I did manage a little of that poem down below.)

Tomorrow is National Poem in Your Pocket Day, though your local town may have chosen a different day, so look it up.  Wrightsville is doing it on April 29.  But if you’re at my school, you need to have your poem ready to read to me tomorrow.  I will bring the chocolate.

I have five minutes for this poem:

The ghost of a dream
will inhabit the foggy
pathways of my brain
for ages.
I will spend today
driving to Kabul
behind a camel
or lurking in the hallways
of a grand hotel,
searching for lost memories.

Gratitude List:
1. Sleeping through four o’clock.  This is a big deal, and I am grateful, no matter how strange the dreams that accompanied that sleep.
2. Anticipating oriole.  Waiting for the orange flash and the whistle in the treetops.  Listen, listen and watch.
3. Inspiration.  Okay, it’s inspiration about how to introduce adjective clauses to the freshmen, but when that’s the soup you swim in, it’s pretty exciting to get a flash of inspiration.
4. Student poetry.  Yesterday the Creative Writers read their poetry out loud in class.  Actually, only a handful were brave enough to do it, but the ones that came out were wonderful, and at one point after one student had read her poem, I saw another student start to scribble furiously on his notebook.  Moments later, he raised his hand to read–he had just written a poem inspired by her poem.  And hers had been inspired by Robert Frost, so we left our own trails in those yellow woods.
5. Compassion.  How heart reaches to heart.  How a moment can suddenly turn to caring, to holding another.  I want to be more and more mindful of how a word or a gesture or a glance can turn a moment among people to an inner watchfulness, a heightened awareness of each others’ tender souls.

May we walk in Beauty!

Invisibility

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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Yesterday as I was walking out of school, a robin began his spring song in the little tree in the parking lot.  This is Josiah’s robin from last year.  He has taped it to our living room wall, and expanded the picture onto other sheets of paper.

You walk on tiptoe,
keeping to the shadows.
Even your voice is hidden
deep in a pocket somewhere,
beneath a layer of gum wrappers,
tissues, and crumbs.

You have practiced the art
of becoming invisible,
of fading into the walls,
until you can step sideways
out of anyone’s awareness.

The trouble with many of the magical arts
is that there comes a point when you don’t know
whether you are casting the spell
or the spell is casting you.

It is time to let this one go.
Walk out of the wallpaper,
stop blurring your edges,
seek your lost voice and speak.

Speak your name into the room,
set your feet firmly on the floor,
and let the world see you.

Gratitude List:
(A list again today)
1. The robin in the tree
2. Digging a hole with a small boy to make a fire pit (though my hands really hurt today from all the shoveling and wheelbarrowing)
3. How you are beginning to let people see you
4. Drawing the line between us, which is to say–making community
5. Opening the bag of this day, to see what it holds inside.  Every day a new thing, eh?  What shall we make of this one?

On Beauty and Love

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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I have been thinking about how to help my students develop confidence in their own strength, to help nurture a sense of self-worth that will help to protect them.  I have noticed how the beauty trap persists for young women, the powerful desire to be seen by the eyes of others (especially boys) as beautiful, and how this feed into their own sense of their own worthiness or unworthiness to be loved.  This poem needs lots of organizing and more thought to it, but it will hold the place for now.

Don’t be beautiful.
Be edgy.  Be friendly. Be bold.
Be strong. Be quirky. Be wild.
Don’t be mild.
Be fierce.  Be thoughtful. Be brave.
Be gracious. Be loving. Be You.
Don’t be cute.
Be happy. Be tender. Be funny.
Be raw. Be powerful. Be real.

Gratitude:
I think I will begin doing one item or one paragraph for a little while.  I am feeling an inner shift these days, a readiness for something new.
I am grateful for love: Love wins.  Follow where the love goes.  That’s where the answers are.

May we walk in Beauty!

What Is the Message?

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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The bluebird told me, and I told the wren.
The bluebird got it from someone on the ground,
a vole, perhaps, or field mouse,
who’d caught the gist from the catfish
who lives in a corner of the pond.
She’d heard it from the turtle
who was scratching a hole in the bank
where she could lay her clutch
of pearly eggs, and she said she had learned it
from the black snake looping its way
along a branch of locust, careful of the thorns.
Who knows where that old slitherer
came upon the information?  Perhaps
she heard it on the wind
as it whispered through the valley.

I regret I cannot tell you what it was–
it has gone on now, beyond me
and beyond this poem’s edges.
Ask wren, perhaps, but he has already
told the thing to bat, who’s given it
to a thoughtfully grazing groundhog
who keeps her springtime quarters
across the field there by the little oak,
right where a sprinkle of sunshine
sparkles in the dew most mornings.

Gratitude List:
1. Earth: The view from the top of the ridge of Mt. Pisgah, looking down to the Susquehanna River always lifts my spirits.  How did I get so lucky, to get such a view almost every day?
2. Air: Poetry and Stories spoken aloud.  Last night’s Spoken Word Play (the 14th) was profound and powerful.
3. Fire: Making fire with the boys yesterday.  Ellis finally drew flames from a pile of sycamore fluff, using the sun’s rays through a magnifying glass.  Joss wanted a fire, too, so we built two small fires on bricks on the driveway, and the boys spent hours feeding them with sticks (it cleaned up the yard, that’s certain).  Joss toasted a piece of bread, and they each roasted potatoes in the hot coals for our supper.  I recently read, “They won’t remember their best afternoon of television.”  That’s the truth.  But I think they’ll remember the day they made fire.
4. Water: The River.  Did I say the River?  I cross her twice every day.  She runs through our lives like a thread that weaves us together with the lives of those who live all along her shores, and with those who have ever lived here in this place where she runs.
5. Spirit: That which enlivens and animates us.  Love that connects and weaves us together, like the River.

May we walk in Beauty!

Today’s Task

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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Today has a singular work,
a quest that only you can accomplish,
a riddle that only you can solve.
What is the knot that you will untangle?
What missing piece will you add to the puzzle?

In the story, you enter the house of the witch
and she gives you three impossible tasks,
problems that you must solve
with heart and ingenuity
and a little help from a friend.
What has she asked of you today?

Gratitude List:
1. Tweaking.  Trying until you get it right.
2. Fun with First Graders.  Yesterday’s field trip was delightful, even when the bus broke down.
3. My children’s wise and caring teachers.
4. Good stories.  Well acted.  Well told.  Well lived.
5. How the heart seeks what it needs.

May we walk in Beauty!

Awakenings

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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(Some of them survived!)

Here in the green
where the wren is calling
and earthworms begin their work,
you can sense the great heart
of the whole,
beating,
loving,
aware.

Gratitude List:
1. Awakeners.  People (both the mentoring and the challenging) who wake up something within me that wants to be more whole, more real, more alive.
2. Love wins.  Love will always win.  Put down your stones and walk away.  Love wins.
3. Field Trip.  Today I am taking a personal day to be a mom rather than a teacher.  First graders are going to the Science Factory.
4. Hafiz.  “Your heart and my heart are very, very old friends.”  They are, aren’t they?
5. How some people center their wisdom in their compassionate hearts.  That’s the direction I want to go, too.

May we walk in Beauty!

Don’t Know How to Pray

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

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When I don’t know how to pray:

What can you see out the windows
of your hospital room?
Clouds scuttling through blue
or raindrops chanting down?
Does a crow saunter down the wind
or a dove whistle through air?

Or there, in the rooms where you wait,
look for that crack in the corner,
the spider missed by the cleaning crew.
Watch for the color orange
in someone’s shoelaces
or an owl brooch on a nurse’s lanyard.

I’m sending you something by wind,
by feather, by stone,
sending you heart and fire,
sending you prayers like rain.

Gratitude List:
1. Having the hard conversations.  They make us better people.  And that’s what we’re here for, eh?  To become better people.
2. Spoken Word Play 14.  We had our dress rehearsal last night.  Dress rehearsal is actually my favorite part–that’s when I get to hear everyone else’s poems and stories.
3. Praying in any way I can.  Being part of the web.  I think I say this one a lot, but it seems to come around a lot.  And I need to acknowledge within myself the anxieties I feel for the people I love, but I don’t want to dwell on those, so it helps to take it to this place, to give the mind the work to do.  Send love.  Send prayer.  Send a mockingbird.
4. Boy walking down the hall yesterday with a red tulip behind his ear.  (Yeah, yeah–he probably shouldn’t have picked it.  Still, it was cute.)
5. My youngest kid is turning into a grammar cop.  I’ll have to catch him before he turns too pedantic, but in the meantime, it’s really fun to have him sit here berating me for beginning sentences with “And. . .”

May we walk in Beauty!

Vision and Re-Vision

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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My classroom door.  Perhaps it’s time to tidy it a bit.

What of Little Red’s mother?
She had to know the child would wander,
had to know the natural curiosity,
the inborn politeness that would not scorn a stranger,
toothy as he was, and oily with charm.

Did she lie awake at night,
heart pounding,
plotting how to protect her child
from wolves and poison and brambles?

And when the strange news reached her,
of her child and her mother
rescued from the ravenous belly of death,
did she quake with the knowledge
of all she could not protect them from?

(We’re practicing poetry revisions in Creative Writing right now.  This is one that will need the scalpel, but I might be able to pull something out of it.  Yesterday, I took one of my poems from a few days ago, threw it up on the Smart Board, and did some revisions right in front of them.  They were really quiet.  I hope that it gave them courage to work their own poems into shape.)

Gratitude List:
1. Re-vision.  Re-shaping.  Re-creating.  Re-making.  Re-forming.  (I am thinking that Visions and Re-Visions might be the name of my next book.  I wonder if it’s been done already.)
2. Fifty miles to the gallon.  I have only driven the Prius for a day now, but I have become what Jon calls a hyper-miler–I drive to get the good mileage.
3. Zesty greens
4. The yellow tulips outside the office at school.  Red stripes through the petals.
5. Phoebe and white-throat sparrow, plaintive and insistent.

May we walk in Beauty!

Laundress

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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It has been a couple years since I have had the time and energy to maintain a Poet-Tree in the yard, so I made one on my bulletin board.

Today’s poem is a threading together of fragments of Facebook posts from years gone by on this day.  A Facebook Found Fragment poem.

Doozy of a storm.
The poetry is shredded.
I will be such a laundress today
and fix up my tree.
I have a fierce attachment to hope.

Sleep is such a magical elixir. And elderberry.

The trees are taking that last inbreath
before they explode into bloom.
My heart is breaking. And healing. And breaking.

Soak up the energy,
give yourself a break from perfectionism,
sample a bit and see what it tastes like,
become a drop of sunlight
and whisper in on the breeze.

See? There you have it:
Sometimes I feel so awkward
about who to be, how to be.
But that means there is always something to learn,
always a new path to explore.

Gratitude List:
1. Anniversaries.  Our wedding anniversary may be in September, but today is a special anniversary.  Here is how I said it three years ago: “This day, [29] years ago. Pizza, pool, and a penny for good luck. I decided that it was time to tell that cute shy boy how much I liked him. Turns out, he liked me too. He’s still cute, and sort of shy, and I like him a whole, whole lot.”
2. New car!  When you try to run your vehicles just to the point before they become more expensive to maintain than it would be to buy a new one, then the purchase of a new car is a really big deal.  Roxanne Rustbucket has served us well for many years–she’s the only car our children know.  Hopefully, Pippi (yes, as in Longstocking–we were thinking of VillavillaCoola) Prius will haul us safely through another decade.
3. Having a day of lesson plans that just follow simply from yesterday’s lesson plans and don’t need a huge amount of planning.
4. Mary Oliver
5. All the shining eyes of the day–thoughtful, hopeful, tricksy, needing, giving, knowing, compassionate, connecting. . .

So much love!  May we walk in Beauty.

Let Your Poem Out to Breathe

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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Artist at work.

Today we will do the revision,
the re-make, the whole re-creation.
Today, we bleed.
Read it, and read it again.
Does it say what it means to?
Then get out your scalpel,
excise and re-shape,
find the new form hidden
beneath the words.
Let your poem out to breathe.

Gratitude List:
1. Bruce’s spinach and feta scones
2. I got my copy of Valerie Baer’s Baking With Whole Grains
3. Pot luck
4. Revising.  The poem, the plan, the purpose, even.
5. Getting Ready for Spoken Word Play.  Memorizing.  Seeing Daina and Marie again.  Feeling the shape of the poems on the stage.

May we walk in Beauty!