Poems

Let Me Learn

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

DSCN8834

May I learn to walk today
the way that butterfly walks
down sunbeams and breezes
in a purposeful meander
from shimmer to glory to shine:
desire to desire

to speak in the manner of fox
who listens all day from her home
in a hole beneath bramble
quiet and quivering,
and speaks only in the dark
a fierce and joyful bark
that tingles the spine
and calls out the wildness

to dream the dreams
of the ones who will become,
there in the round stones
of shell, patient, breathing,
until the moment is ripe
for breaking open the houses
that have held them protected.

Gratitude List:
1. Hearing the fox scream from the bosque in the midnight.  Terrifying and thrilling.
2. The Underground Railroad history of Columbia.  We went to see a train layout at the Columbia Historical Preservation Society yesterday and got into conversation with a man who is an expert on Columbia’s role in helping people escape from slavery.
3. These halcyon days of Winter Break that are almost at an end.  It has been time out of time.  Many mornings for snuggling.  Lots of play and chatter.  (In the interests of balanced reporting, it must probably be noted that there has been yelling and grouching and sulking as well).
4. Dream-messages
5. Moving on to new chapters.

May we walk in Beauty!

This is How It Begins

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

This is how it begins:
each year, each week, each day,
each golden shining drop of moment
approaches,
full of expectancy,
dawning,
ready for our use.

How will I inhabit the house
of the now that approaches?
How will I wear the cloth
of the day that is given?
How will I wander the story
of the year that has just now
leapt into shining view
through the gray clouds of winter?

I will face this year with resolution
(this week, this day, this moment)
not to wait until this whirling planet
has danced around the sun
to make the new thing new,
but to step into each freshly-birthed now
with eyes that see the golden shine of possibility
and ears that hear the note of each plucked strand of moment.

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Dew on Mullein.

Gratitude List:
1. Yesterday, the family together celebrating a woman of wisdom and compassion.  Some families celebrate the New Year.  We celebrate a birthday.
2. More conversations with the beloved community, with wise parents and in-laws and out-laws.  How listening well and sharing ideas becomes more than the sum of all the conversational bits that appear. How ideas build upon ideas, and shape the ones that came before, and open up spaces for new thoughts to appear.  How iron sharpens iron.  How certain conversations at certain moments prepare me to do the Work that approaches.
3. Three golden rays of sun yesterday before the sun set, shooting through a rift in the grey cloud.  The sun, the sun, the sun: I saw the sun!  And now, here in the crisp morning, nothing but blue above, and golden shine now slipping over the ridge and into the hollow.
4. I have been listening this week to Mindy Nolt’s Movers and Lovers, deeply and intensely, grateful for each phrase.  Move. Love. Listen.
5. The Work.  I am learning, slowly and in tiny little ways, to stop asking myself what I can get from each moment, but instead what my Work is here in the moment.  And realizing, ever so dimly, that when I am really doing my Work (really doing my Work), I am also receiving what I need.

May we–in each dawning moment of this coming year and week and day–walk in Beauty!

Send Down the Roots

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Roots
(As is the way with internet searches, I found this beautiful piece of artwork with no reference to the artist.  If you know, please send me the information.)

Now is the time
to send down the roots,
fine little hairs feeling their way
spiraling into the moist darkness,
between clods and stones,
around the bones
of those who came before,
through the streams that run
deep beneath the surface.

Now is the time
to feed and nurture
all that lives beneath the surface,
all that searches for depth,
all that gathers strength
from the comforting darkness of earth.

Now is the time to bless
the part of the plant that seeks shadow,
that grows inward,
faithfully finding its way
by blind instinct
toward the center.

Gratitude List:
1. Tea with Marie and Benn, conversing and exploring puzzles with the beloved community.
2. How a puzzle on the table creates a perfect setting for making a new friend.  It fills up the awkward silences, gives you a shared task, and is itself an image of untangling and ordering creating a new thing.
3. Roots
4. Still a few more days of Christmas Break.  I feel myself opening, loosening, drawing toward my center.
5. Richard Rohrer.  Moving on from Cynthia Bourgeault’s deepening words of Advent, I have begun to work more intentionally with his daily words.  Today:

God’s life is living itself in me. I am aware of life living itself in me.
God’s love is living itself in me. I am aware of love living itself in me.

May Love live us.

Throw Open the Windows

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candle

If you wish to find rest here below and hereafter, in all circumstances say, “Who am I?” and do not judge anyone. –Abba Joseph to Abba Poemen

Rattle the bars,
turn the screws loose,
throw off a limitation or two
like veils and garments cast to the wind.
Open the windows and doors,
welcome the wild wind,
escape the cage.

Gratitude List:
1. Synchronicity.  When you begin to look for it, you see it everywhere.
2. Advent.  Something new is coming.
3. Weekends.  Time to rest.
4. Solstice.  Soon, soon, soon the sun returns.
5. Poetry in the hands and brains and hearts of ninth graders.  Brilliant.

May our hearts, our hands, our minds be open to what the day brings.

Growth

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A caution, from William Stafford:

“If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in
the world and following the wrong god
home, we may miss our star.”

found poem
A found poem I put together a year ago.

Gratitude List:
1. Cleaning and shifting in order to make room for Christmas.  Changing up the routine.  Even Mzee Fred, the old man cat, changed his routine: we couldn’t bear to kick him out last night–he looked so peaceful sleeping under the tree–so we left him there, and he didn’t come yowling up the stairs at 3:30 in typical fashion.  I woke him up this morning.
2. Taking a day’s break from the news.  I may do it again today.  Only a few moments at day’s beginning and day’s end. . .  Bringing the Contemplative and the Activist into balance.
3. Pattern and texture and line.  I have started exploring the meditative possibilities of Zentangles and doodles again, and am loving the way it helps me notice things, to pay attention.  It can get obsessive, as it did the other day when a girl with amazing braids walked into my class–I wanted to sit down and draw them.  She had braided several little strands of fishtail braid and then she braided those together.  Layers of line and texture.
4. Mercy.  Like dawn, like light streaming in, illuminating the dark corners.
5. How we grow together in wisdom.  One of us says something, and it sparks a new idea for the other.  Together we refine and develop and grow and share.  Isn’t it lovely how that works?  Thank you for being open to working new wisdom together.

May was walk in Beauty, in Mercy, in Wisdom.

The Moment

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

I lay down for a nap, to try to sleep off some of this fog.  I thought that perhaps I could catch a fish from the dream-stream for the poem that I am to write today.  The prompt is “let the moment begin.”  When I woke up, the last line of this poem that I wrote in April of 2014 was singing itself over and over again in my head.  It took me about half an hour to realize it was my own.

Prayer

To wait within the moment for the coming dawn,
To breathe the single breath of all that lives,
To walk the web on which we all belong,
To face the newborn day with love instead of fear.

To listen for the whisper of the Spirit’s wind,
To feel Creator’s heartbeat in the world around,
To hear the grace of the Beloved in my neighbor’s voice,
To embrace the sacred space between the past and change.

* * * *

So, today’s poem might look a little like this:

Step into the stream of time and change,
feel the tug and swirl that draws you on,
swimming where the current takes you.
Say the words that hammer at your throat:

I am here.

And again, as you feel the current take you,
no longer the same here where you were:

I am here.  And here.  I am here.

Let it echo from the walls of your heart
as the stream bears you onward and outward.
Each time you say it, you burst into flame,
all flame, all wind, all perfect dreaming:

I am here.

An Open Letter

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Today’s Prompt is An Open Letter.  I am so beaten up by this bad cold that I can’t even think straight to write.

An Open Letter to the Bug

I don’t even know what to call you:
A Bad Cold? Feverless Flu? Exasperation?
Whatever.  I concede.  You’ve got me.

I knew going in to that family party three days ago
that I was already sunk, but I struggled onward,
enjoyed the day, and likely infected at least three loved ones.

By yesterday, I was sure I was back on my feet again
but you laid me so low, I couldn’t even taste
that sweet potato casserole, that shoo-fly pie.

Today was just a blur of throwing good money
after bad.  I can just do this one more thing,
I thought, but I’m a goner now, for sure.

I’ll soak myself in Ny-Quil
and sleep you out of my system.

Vast and Inescapable

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

The prompt is to write a poem based on “It was a dark and stormy night,” but to substitute my own adjectives.  I’m not entirely sure what this is about, but I’m still working out the dream.  Where does a pacifist find such visceral scenes of violence?

It Was a Vast and Inescapable Night

It was a vast and inescapable night.
The ghost in the attic had called his benediction
down the stairs–“Get out of here!” he’d said
as cheerily as usual, which is to say, not a whit.

The Night Mare whinnied in my ear,
“I have a nice little gallop planned for you tonight.”
She promised me she’d take it slow to start,
and show me deeper pools than usual.
I’d learn new meanings of my name.

The man was weeping when I shot him in the head
although he knew, like me, what was required.
It was myself I shot, of course, so loss and fear
and grief compounded with the guilt I felt,
the trembling gun still steaming in my hand,
and a body waiting for discreet disposal.

“I have done this work before,” I told my shadow steed,
“The murder.  Culpability.  The hiding of the body.
But in past dreams I was the victim, not the agent.”
Last time, my life was vastly changed.

I wish I could say that the sun sprang forth
into morning with a hearty shout,
that I leaped out of my bed,
my new name burning in the air above me.

But days have passed and the curmudgeonly ghost
still treats me more rudely than I deserve.
My Shadow Mare has left me to wander
the dream meadows darkly and in silence.

I wear my new name around my neck
in a small leather pouch.
I have yet to check it, to see it,
to listen for its colors in the bright day.

Leftovers

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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Prompt: Write a leftovers poem.

What you have is the residual,
the leftover, the new guiding principle:
When all is said and done the finest morsel
may be in the doggie bag
awaiting your next meal.

Don’t underestimate the power
of the second day’s feast,
the way memory seasons the taste
with her own sweet-savory-sweet,
how the sharp edges of solitude
define the shape of intimacy.

Gratitude List:
1. That streak of orange fox, lithe and muscular, that raced across our path yesterday morning while we were on the way to Thanksgiving dinner.
2. Laughing together
3. Singing together
4. Eating together
5. Moments of solitude, too.

May we walk in Beauty!

Luxuriate in Love

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EWK 5 001
May your baskets be overflowing.

Today’s prompt is to write a luxury poem.

Today, whatever you do,
take a moment to
luxuriate in love.

Gratitude List:
1. Taking a day to acknowledge gratitude.
2. Reason and logic
3. Magic and mystery
4. Honey and lemon tea
5. You.  Thank you for being in my life.

May we walk in Beauty!