Poems

Tangle

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Write a Love/Anti-Love Poem.  I am struggling with my lack of love for the purveyors of violent and xenophobic rhetoric, so that’s where I went today.

To practice lovingkindness
includes that tiny word
that stops me up every time.
Most, perhaps.
But all?

I can love the tangerine sunset
glowing upward onto aquamarine cloud.
I can love the orange orb as it falls
below the hills to my west,
and its ghostly echo the moon,
sailing behind a bank of gray to east.
The curling wisteria I can love,
and the earnest eyes of the fox kit.
My heart reaches upward, fiercely loving
the starlings in their whirling dance.

But so many layers lie between me
and love for the leering buffoon.
See, the language, even,
has to peel away,
and then anxiety’s rising tide
that eats away at the beach
of compassion.

Turn the next page, and everything
is colored by impotent rage.
How can I cast the line out of this tangle?

Ho’oponopono

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

DSCN8634

Brewer’s prompt for today is to write an apology poem.  My friend Natasha, who writes the blog The Year of Black Clothing, introduced me to the Ho’oponopono, a traditional Hawaiian ritual of forgiveness. There are four sentences in the process, sentences which are meant to transform the person speaking as well as to bring healing to the situation.

Apology to the World

I am sorry.
Please forgive me.
I love you.
Thank you.
~~Ho’oponopono

For taking more than my share.
For closing my eyes and my ears.
For talking over your pain.
For telling you how it should be.
For assuming you were my enemy.
For ignoring your story.
For belaboring the point.
For walking away.
For becoming helpless with worry.
I am sorry.
Please forgive me.
I love you.
Thank you.

Gratitude List:
1. Dawn and sunset.
2. Yesterday’s stories.  Dreams.  Mystery.  Healing.
3. Yesterday’s songs.
4. Yesterday’s work.
5. Today’s possibilities.

May we walk in Beauty!

Waiting for History to Repeat Herself

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today’s prompt is to write a poem titled: “Waiting for (blank).”  I don’t want this to be inevitable.  I am writing out of my anxiety tonight.

Waiting for History

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.

“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.

High Upon the Dream Scene

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Solomon Shandy

Write a strange poem, he says.  Sort of inspired by the hype and hip of Sharon Bryan’s “Sweater Weather: A Love Song to Language.”  (I am stopping before I feel this poem is really finished–I am stuck in the web of the poem and I think that I have learned from it what I wanted to learn.)

High upon the dream scene,
water golden, meadow green,
shadows calling, day is falling,
where you wander unseen.

From the inky shadows ooze
spectres that you did not choose
wraiths are creeping, nightmares leaping
into dreamtime’s twisting blues.

In the maze you race and blunder,
running from the sound of thunder.
Heart is pounding, rest confounding,
caught within the spell you’re under.

I can’t seem to get out of this poem–I guess that’s how the nightmares roll.  But I need to get on with my day, so I am going to just stop here.  I did love the way the rhythm and the rhyme scheme sort of defined themselves as I wrote.

Gratitude List:
1. Labyrinths.  I have been under a compulsion again lately to doodle them.  After an experience last week in which I felt like someone was trying to stuff me into a claustrophobic little box, I think my default was to head into the labyrinth for safety.
2. Sitting on the chair in the sun this morning, with a small person reading to me.
3. Fall veggies.
4. Generosity.  Local folks gave over six million dollars yesterday to organizations that offer care and hope to the world.  I am proud of this community.  My shaken faith in humanity is being rebuilt.
5. Breathing love into the wounds.

May we walk in Beauty!

Plunder

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

Today’s prompt is to use at least three of these words in a poem: lagoon, plunder, artifact, wobble, relent, horrendous.  I love these.  They pull me out of my ruts.

After the relentless storm and plunder,
after the horrendous calm,
she searches the silent pools,
she scours the quiet caves of the lagoon,
she watches the gulls winging down the beach,

seeking for surviving artifacts
shining fragments that glint in the sunlight,
pearls scattered in the glistening sands.

The hunt for the missing pieces
occupies her haggard attention
and draws her thoughts away from the loss.

Salvage becomes her salvation.

“No Ideas but in Things”

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today’s prompt is to follow William Carlos Williams’ thought, “No ideas but in things,” and write a thing-poem. I have no wheelbarrow, no jar in Tennessee, no plums in the icebox.  I am obsessed with bowls.

Is it the way the light shines
on the concave surface of the blue bowl,
or the way the shadows gather
underneath its curving belly?

Or is it, rather, about the beach pebbles
and the shell with its iridescent green
resting in its sheltered slopes?

Perhaps it is the memory of wet clay,
the hands that scooped and stretched,
that shaped and fashioned its elegant contours.

How it settles, how it breathes in the lamplight,
how it speaks my name when I pass by.

Lightbulb

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today’s prompt came late, after I had begun my school day, so I’m only getting to it now.  The prompt is to write an idea poem.

God is disruptive, he told us.
That’s a new one, I thought.

Perhaps that’s how it ought to be,
he said, not letting you settle
too deeply into the ruts,
pushing you off your perch,
disturbing your equilibrium,
subverting your comfort zone.

She chases me out into the desert,
colors me out of the lines,
thinks me out of the box.
How else should I want it,
I, who choose the savannah
over the closed cathedral?

I’m not entirely sure that this is true to me.  Perhaps for those of us who choose the fields rather than the boxes, the disruption comes in the form of those who would try to reel us in and lock us into their claustrophobic rooms.  This is actually the disruption that I experienced this past week, though I am not sure I would connect it to the message from a disruptive Godde.

Ode to a Flock of Crows

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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Too much in a hurry to seek out a birdy sort of photo for today.  Here’s a picture of the late fall farm season.

On the Two-for Tuesday prompts, I usually try to combine the two pieces of the prompt, to let the opposite ideas create a dynamic tension in the poem.  Plus, I hate to feel as though I am missing out on any part of an experience.  Today’s is a little more complicated, and I might just have to settle for one piece.  We’ll see what happens.  Here’s the prompt:

 

  1. Take the phrase “Ode to a (blank),” replace the blank with a word or phrase, make the new phrase the title of your poem, and then, write your poem.
  2. Take the phrase “(blank) is for the Birds,” replace the blank with a word or phrase, make the new phrase the title of your poem, and then, write your poem.

How they wheel and settle,
wheel and settle.
Their business is their own.

When the trees along the tracks
have lost their leaves,
and reach their naked branches
into the salmon-colored sky,
their crowns fill with crows.
Connect the dots,
a web of birds fills the world.

These are the people of the wind,
the warriors of autumn.
Watching them, even I
can turn my face toward the winter.

Gratitude List:
1. The crowd of crows.  I always feel like I have to qualify this for the people who have to live more closely with them, because I, too, get tired of the purple pokeberry splotches all over my car from the starling flock in the hollow, but I love the crows that wheel and settle in the trees near the mall.  I love seeing them just as the sky is beginning to turn orange, and they dot the treetops and electrical wires.
2. Challengers.  They give you a chance to look at your internal world, and remind you to keep checking in with yourself and to be faithful to your inner truth.
3. Compassionate hearts.
(I wasn’t really going for a C theme today, but now I think I need to finish it out.)
4. Coffee.  It gets me through the morning.
5. Creativity.  Building up and creating are a great antidote to despair and rage.

May we walk in Beauty!

Haunting

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

2012 February 058

Today’s prompt is to write a haunted poem.

Everything leaves its imprint,
like the stain of a leaf long-gone to soil
which moldered on the concrete walk
leaving its shadow for another season’s grace.

Your very atoms press against the air,
push through the space around you.
Why should the sense of you be gone
when you are gone?  Why shouldn’t your image
remain behind to haunt the space you filled?

When you turn a corner you will see them,
in those rooms you inhabit inside your soul,
shifting lights and shadows,
mirages or reflections.

Listen for the whispering:
“I was here. I will always be here.”

Gratitude List:
1. Richard Rohr.  Remember, it’s about grace.
2. The Subversive Jesus.  Who is throwing stones?
3. Earthshine.  Have you seen how we light up the moon, even when she is only a sliver?
4. Meeting the day.
5. You.  How you receive the world with open arms.  How you do not judge the worthiness of others or separate people into categories or close doors to keep some out and to lock others in.  How you remind me that there are still people who walk in the way of grace.

May we walk with Great Grace.

Wait for the Story

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

2011 June 227

Today’s prompt is to write a ritual poem.  This is one of my favorite words.  I love internal preparations for sacred and holy moments.  Here is one pathway inward:

It’s a room that you enter, a space you create.
Settle your roots: down, down and deeper,
raising your branches out into starlight.

Breath first, the winds and the breezes,
scent of the morning, shelter of dawn,
many voices calling, whispering, singing.

Feel your fire rising,
energy lifting your spirit like flame.
Burn.  Let desire be the fuel.

The river flows through you, around you, within you:
quiet meandering, raging through rapids.
Gaze deep into pools for the answers you seek.

Stand firmly on earth.  Let it hold you and shape you.
Enter the cave which leads to your center.
Rock is your reason.  Soil is your mentor.

Enter the labyrinth, spiral to center.
You come to the crossroads, the meeting of pathways:
Rest in the shadows.  The story will find you.

 

Gratitude List:
1. Play
2. Work
3. Song
4. Art
5. Well-being

May we walk in Beauty!