Poems

My Cat, the Alchemist

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Ah.  This is awkward.  Today’s prompt is to name your poem “My (fill in), the (fill in).”  For some reason cat and alchemist were in my brain, and I didn’t manage to exorcise them before they started to become a poem.  Silly, perhaps, or campy, but something in me sort of likes it.

My Cat, the Alchemist

He takes me in my sleeping state
and transmutes me to my waking self,
reaching through the gates
between those two worlds
with a cry like a human babe

and claws that shred
the stuff of dreams
to ribbons of image,
figments of half-memory,

and I am running faster
down that railroad bridge,
running from a lion
who keeps calling my name,

I am pulled from my quiet wanderings
through the empty rooms of a house
I both know and don’t know.

Some nights I can pull myself
gently back between the bars,
mend the tattered cloth of dream
and sail back into my night voyages.

Often, though, I find myself
wriggling and twisting, caught
in the bars between worlds,
neither quite here, nor quite there,
but an industrial purr beside me
and a small warm body against my leg.

Gratitude List:
1. Yes, I am utterly and unquenchably redundant, but have you seen the pink trees?  Pink Trees.  Number one on my gratitude list.  Pink, pink, pink, pink, pink.  “That’s nice,” says Joss, “because pink is my new favorite color.”  <Yes!>
2. Dinner with the dormies.  That was fun and yummy. We took a walk afterward, and a student’s father yelled out his car window that he loves to see families out walking together.
3. Random blessings from strangers.  See #2.
4. The Lego Museum.  Halfway through the DC day yesterday, Joss said, “I want to go home now.  I want to make a Lego Museum.”  Art imitates life.  He could only take in so much before he had to go start creating in response to it.
5. Kindness.

May we walk in Beauty!

Lament

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today’s prompt is authority.  I decided to do an acrostic.  I wrote this on I-95, on our way home from a wonderful museum trip to Washington DC this evening.

Always there’s someone saying what they think you ought to do: the
Undertaker, the Poet, the Preacher, the Farmer, the Witch.
There’s never any time to really decide to switch your
Horses there in mid-stream, or, for that matter,
On the bank.  Someone’s always in a flutter,
Railing at you to follow their own plan
In perfect detail.  It never gives you
Time to live it for
Yourself.

Gratitude List:
1. Peregrines.  I saw two falcon-y birds on the way to DC this morning.  Perhaps they were only some sort of accipiter, but they made me think of peregrines.
2. Driving into spring.  Only 45 minutes from home, we were already into much fuller foliage.  Red bud trees.  Forsythia along the highways.  And Maryland plants daffodils everywhere along I-83!
3. Deciding to look into the National Gallery for a moment and stumbling on all those Monets and Cezannes and Manets and Gaugins, Cassatts and Morisots.  I knew they were there, of course, and I’ve never raced through them quite the way we did today, but it was a treat to see them with the small people, even if they did act bored.
4. The Air and Space Museum.  Learning more about the moon landing, about the Space Shuttle program, about the ISS.  I hope my boys aren’t going to sign up for a trip to Mars.
5. Riding the Metro with the boys.  “My favorite part of the train ride,” says Youngest, “was the ‘Step back.  Doors closing.'”

May we walk in Beauty, with cherry blossoms falling all around.

Vowel Limit

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today’s prompt: Choose two vowels and only use those vowels in your poem.  Y is a wild card.  Kind of fun and challenging.  I am choosing I and E because I was thinking of the word thistle today in the fields as we were planting potatoes.

pick this thistle in this field
its sisters will rise in this site

despite the intent
which desires its demise
the thistles will rise

we fiddle, we fidget
intending the best

yet despite my designs
which inspire difference
the thistles will rise

Gratitude List:
1. Planning adventures.  Off to DC tomorrow to ride the Metro, to explore Air and Space, to walk the Mall, and perhaps to see cherry blossoms.
2. Potato planting.  Good help, good company, good hard work.
3. The trees on the hill with their barely-there haze of new red and green.   When I worked at The People’s Place in Intercourse, we used to sell beautiful etchings by the artist Allan Eitzen that I think of whenever I see the trees like this.  I can only find his children’s book illustrations online.
4. Chickadees’ springtime calls: “Suweet!  Suweet!”  Up, then down.
5. Another nice snake skin, this one twisted almost perfectly back around like an ouroboros.

May we walk in Beauty!

Swing

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

That’s today’s prompt: swing.  I think I will try a lai with this one.  Nine lines, aabaabaab rhyme scheme, and the a lines are 5 syllables, while the b lines are 2.

I need you to know
how strong you will grow.
This thing
cannot keep you low,
will not stop your flow.
You’ll swing
while the wild winds blow,
you’ll pass to and fro
and sing.

I wanted to write a longer and more in-depth piece to someone, about unconditional love and being deserving of love, but this will hold the place for that, and hopefully say a little of what I want to get across.

 

Gratitude List:
1. Being trusted
2. Trusting
3. Safe places
4. Glory clouds
5. Forsythia, forsythia, forsythia

Take my hand.  May we walk in Beauty.

Science

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

EWK 4 001

The prompt for the day is science.  Today I encouraged my ninth grade poets to break out beyond the sense to simply create interesting connections with words.  That’s what I am doing here.  I decided to embed each line inside syllables that would sound roughly like the word science.  With more time, it could be fun to try to tweak something like this into a more elegant poem.

Silent as a mouse creeping along a fence,
Simple the patterns, but intricate the sense,
Since what’s in the center is often intense,
Sift carefully through all the evidence,
Silt washes away, leaving behind reverence.

Gratitude List:
1. This morning’s sunrise, so intense I almost had to stop the car.
2. Green!  Skunk cabbages in the little creek-hollow along Ducktown Road, the briars beginning to green in the understory of the woods, ferns unfurling, lilies of the valley, chickweed, catnip, myrtle.
3. Pink trees
4. My delightful colleagues
5. The sweet concern of my students for my health.  Yesterday, I put on my Smart Board: “Voice Lost.  If found, please return to Room 206.  Also, bring chocolate.”  One student brought me brownies this morning and a get-well card she had made, with hilarious sayings about chocolate.  Yet another student recommended I take honey and lemon, this time with apple cider vinegar.  And now, my voice is returning.

May we walk in Beauty!

Honesty / Dishonesty

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

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(Sometimes things just appear in the Chromebook photo files.)

Today’s prompt, two for Tuesday, is to write an honest and/or a dishonest poem.  This is something of an experiment.  This is not about anyone I know personally.  She is more of an idea, or an idea of an idea.  I don’t know if I am saying what I mean, or making up a meaning by saying.

I knew a woman
honest as the rain,
honest as the bluest sky,
whose hands opened and closed
like petals in the sun.

And we were all afraid of her,
of the scorch and the soak of her,
the blinding goodness of her.

We all harbored our demons in secret,
nourished them in those secret rooms
under the quiet earth,
deep in our shadowselves.

And still she came seeking us,
always revealing us,
breaking down the doors of us.

‘Til there was nothing but blue sky,
rain in the mornings,
and her hands, closing and opening.

And we were no more.

Gratitude List:
1. My voice.  I have lost it at the moment, and am suddenly grateful for the gift of speech.
2. People who try to understand others in a situation rather than try to establish their rights in the situation.
3. The green and reddish frosting on the woods that cover the hills by the River.
4. How sounds carry meaning.  I am grateful for the way this job of teaching English keeps me always aware of language, of sound and meaning.
5. Jamming on the violin with Ellis on the cello.  We’re incredibly squeaky, but we like the way we sound together.

May we walk in Beauty!

Confession

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

It always happens about mid-month when I am doing a poem-a-day: I start to poop out a bit, leaving the work of it–even the imagining part–until later and later in the day.  I loved the idea I started to work with today, using this crazy photo from Facebook to get the prompt rolling (it’s on the theme of confession), but now I feel the pressure to rush it so I can get on to planning tomorrow’s classes.

Confession

I admit it:
I still have the vandal’s fantasies,
One of my heroes is Banksy.
I love the artists and agitators
who take their social commentary
to the streets.

Sometimes I hear stories
of the tricksters and their mischief
and I wish that I had thought of them myself–
like exchanging the voices of talking dolls
so Barbie growls, “Vengeance is mine!”
and G.I. Joe opines, “Math class is sooooo hard!”

In college, I dreamed of joining
ninja women climbing billboards
to plaster “Not on our bodies!”
over the bodies of women
selling cars with their bodies.

Today was another last straw
in a long, long line of last straws:
Two packets of poetry magnets,
the pink one and the blue.
I want to buy them up and scramble,
then sell them in orange and green packages
declaring: Ballet worms and rugby wings!
I’ll climb into my fairy aeroplane
and grab my handbag
for a ride with the skeleton bunnies.

This is just a warning
so when you see the headlines
about the local schoolteacher
caught making a ruckus in the toy store,
you won’t need to be shocked.
Just roll your eyes and say,
“Well, it’s about time!”

Gratitude List:
1. Bluebells!  (I know–they’re technically grape hyacinths, but I don’t really care.  We called them bluebells when I was a child, so bluebells they will be).
2. Spring tonic pesto: large handfuls of chickweed, with a little dandelion, burdock, nettle, garlic mustard, wild mustard, sorrel, wild garlic.
3. Joss’s book is past seventy pages now.  He keeps adding sections: tonight included pieces of a Baby Animals calendar and a Birds calendar.  And always the demand, like a pushy schoolteacher: “Write sentences!”
4. A spring-like day.  I feel better, being slightly sick on day like today, than I did, being mostly well on a gray and cloudy day.
5. Reading Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Everything with Ellis.

May we walk in Beauty!

Assessing the Damage

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today’s poetry prompt is to write about damage.  I have let it go until very late, and I am feeling a little under the weather, so it’s going to be a quick-ish thing:

The week after the whirling winds
twisted the house like toys and tossed
them in pieces all around someone’s neighborhood,
scattering debris across the cornfields
like some strange new crop,
we drove out to see the scene,
to assess the damage.

Numbly, the people were picking
through the wreckage of their lives,
holding out their hopes for one family photo,
one undamaged antique china cup
left untouched by the capricious winds.

Just so, when the winds have torn through a life,
we need to witness, to wander through the scene,
grasping what we can salvage with both hands
and holding the scraps and mementos
against our still-beating hearts.

If some day, one of us sees the other one
holding the shards of a dream
or the sodden mess of a hope,
let’s plan (now) that we will step
from the safe vantage point of ourselves
and help each other search
for that one thing that remains whole.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Third Quarter Grades are complete and submitted!
2. I am so glad that I chose to submit work for the Spoken Word Festival again this year.  I love to soak up the energy of poets and wordsmiths.
3. The life of my Uncle Paul, who made his crossing this morning.  The grieving and letting go has been a long, long journey.  I will remember his delight in light and art and photography.  Prayers of blessings and comfort to his family.
4. The willows have begun to put on their lacy veils.  The maples in the woods are all over in red buds.
5. Wind flowers.  The anemone have risen to take the place of the crocus.

May we walk in Beauty!

Seasoning

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Tonight’s prompt is to write a poem about a season:

I am not going to write a poem tonight.
This dog of the seasons, who waits
between winter and spring
to spring out from nowhere,
teeth bared and fur on end.

So I won’t be writing a poem tonight.
Instead I”ll write a recipe:
30 mL of Dayquil
2 zinc tablets
two droppers of Elderberry tincture
and sleep.

 

Gratitude List:
1. Adrenaline.  Got me through tonight, and will get me through tomorrow.
2. Sleep–most powerful elixir.  Nine times out of ten, it works for me.
3. Those poets and storytellers!  I love performing among them.  I love the deliberate and careful spoken word.
4. Forsythia is just starting to bloom!  Another thing to keep me liking my neighbor–so much yellow comes to him in daffodils and forsythia, it must be a message to me to be kind in my thoughts.
5. Josiah’s book.  While it can be draining because he is always begging us to write sentences in it, i love how excited he has been about making his own book.  And he keeps adding and adding and adding to it.
6. The people who are keeping vigil at Chiefs’ Hill today and tonight and tomorrow to grieve the bulldozers on sacred Native American burial grounds.
7. I just lost this entire post, but the computer had automatically saved the draft.  Yay for Autosave!

May we walk in Beauty!

How Will the Day End?

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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Today’s prompt is to write a poem titled “How <fill in the blank>”

How Will the Day End?

It will fade quietly away
or it will go out in blaze.

It will wander off quietly
into a corner of night,
or it will rattle down the drain,
gurgling as it swirls into the dark.

It will be filled with the quiet murmurings of doves,
the muttering of the last bars of the day’s bird choir,
or it will go out with the shrill whinny of the screech owl,
the screep of the fox, and the whoof of the white-tailed deer.

It will pull the shades of my eyes downward
and fill my brain with fog,
it will draw out my energy
like serum in a syringe.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  I know, daffodils again.  But.  Outside the school office is a row of creamy daffodils with a buttery center.  But in one clump, one daffodil has a bright gold-orange center, just begging for attention.
2. Making and playing Lego Chess with Ellis.
3. Friday morning hymn sing–this remains one of my favorite moments of my week.  My colleagues have wonderful voices.
4. The library book sale!  I scored lots of classics for my classroom shelves, and some more contemporary young adult novels, too.  Jon bought me a copy of Ted Kooser’s Delights and Shadows, which contains this lovely poem, titled “Screech Owl”:
All night each reedy whinny
from a bird no bigger than a heart
flies out of a tall black pine
and, in a breath, is taken away
by the stars. Yet, with small hope
from the center of darkness
it calls out again and again.
5. Delightfully shocking coincidences.  At the sale, Jon also bought a book called American Watercolors and a copy of Little Bear’s Friend, by Else Holmelund Minarik and illustrated by Maurice Sendak.  As he was poring through the book of water colors, he noticed a painting by Carolyn Brady.  In the shadows behind a vase of stunning flowers is a copy of Little Bear’s Friend!  What are the chances of that?  And not only one of the books we bought would feature a very different book from a very different genre, but that someone would be looking through it that closely, to catch it.

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