Poems

Layers of Time

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Making hay on the old farm
(Old Slabaugh Family Photo.  I’ll need to ask around to find out who they are.)

Layers of Time

Sit in this bubble
of now, and settle yourself
into the moment.
The past will wash over you,
and the future will rush in.

Gratitude List:
1. Were I on our custodial staff, I would hate it, so I feel a little sheepish saying this, but I love the way the leaves leaves track all over the floor at school on rainy days.  It’s like the trees are trying to come inside.
2. Our long-suffering and hard-working custodial staff.
3. One of my Chinese students made sushi for Advisory Group snack yesterday.  That was delicious.
4. Problem-solving.  Puzzles.  Conundrums.
5. Restorative Justice.  What if our schools and communities would start offering classes and workshops and trainings in restorative justice, in creatively addressing conflict rather than escalating it?  What if all prospective security guards and police officers were required to log 50 hours of restorative justice training (and anti-racism training) before they entered their jobs?

Blessings on your Beautiful Day!

Golden

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Reach out your hand
like the quivering leaf.
Someone is there to grasp it:
wind, rain, a tiny green spider
wandering, crab-like, across its surface.

Lay your arms upon the air
like the oak branches that are held
in the grasp of the autumn sun.

Somewhere the invisible ones
are listening for the moment
when you offer your story to the breezes.

 

Gratitude List:
1. The fact that I have a lot more sense about how I dress in the daytime than I do in those crazy dreams.
2. Having wild and crazy dreams means I was sleeping last night.  I can feel the restfulness seeping into me.
3. Watching healing take place.  Friendship and kindnesses can begin to draw a person back toward wholeness.  May the healing continue.
4. Students beginning class by asking if we can pray for an injured classmate.
5. Golden.  I came out of school yesterday afternoon, and everything was Golden.

May we walk in Beauty!

Elusive Creature

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When you wander in the wilderness of night,
seeking that elusive creature, sleep,
may you find the quiet lair
of that sweet beast–
the mouth of the cave
hidden among the rocks and brambles
on the hillside by the murmuring stream,
where you can lie down on ferns and mosses
in the shadowy warmth,
and sigh
and dream.

Gratitude List:
1. Oil pastels
2. Butterfly clips
3. Folders for organizing
4. Many-colored pens
5. Fresh paper and sharp pencils

May we walk in Beauty.

Waiting on Words

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Waiting on the words
to do their usual tumble,
I will find instead
a pocketful of golden
leaves, and some scarlet berries.

Gratitude List:
1. Farm friends and farm crew.
2. Bringing the season to a close.  Moving on to a new Season.
3. Yellow carpet of leaves
4. The observations of a six-year-old.  This morning: “Fred’s legs aren’t made like ours are.  It seems like his knees come out of the backs of his legs.”
5. The light at the end of the tunnel.  It’s there, even when I can’t quite make it out in the distance.

May we walk in Beauty!

Never Enough

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A couple weeks ago, we took a ride on a little train, the Ma and Pa–we were in the open car, and our shadows raced along beside us in the leaves.

It’s never enough
to say that the eagle flies
over the River.
It’s never enough to say
that the River is flowing.

Gratitude List:
1. Den’s Service Center: Thursday at 4, I called them and said that I was on my way home from work with a slow leak in my tire.  They said they’d look at it, even though it would be the last (and busiest) half hour of their day.  I made it safely, they found the nail and fixed it, and they only charged me $13.
2. Harvest hymns in Friday morning hymn sing yesterday.
3. Oaks–less showy than the sugar maples, perhaps.  A rich rusty red.
4. The monarch I saw the other day at school.  I stepped outside in a brief moment, and there it was, dancing through the slanting autumn sun rays.
5. Breath.  (Ellis says I need to include things that I take for granted.  I agree.)

May we walk in Beauty!

Threads

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A spider’s web across the path spans the space from here to there:
the bridge across the River, the yarn I knot with my needles,
the trail of crumbs leading out of the woods, the pathway between us.

(Trying my hand at a Korean Sijo this morning.  http://www.ahapoetry.com/sijo.htm)

Gratitude List:
1. Thursday’s chapel speaker: mindful meditation.  Powerful.
2. Soba noodles and fall veggies stirred up in the cast iron wok.  That man is a mighty fine cook.
3. Bridges.  Webs.   Labyrinth pathways.  Strands of yarn being knitted or knotted or crocheted or woven. Narrative threads.
4. Quiet spaces.
5.  Sleep and coffee.

May we walk in Beauty!

Alignment

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here is how holy
in the center of waiting
there is a river
if you lift your eyes, listen
the moment will come to you

Gratitude List:
1. I love my job, but sometimes it’s just such a blessed relief to be on the outward arm of the week.
2. The little Zen garden my mother gave me years ago.  It’s been my kid bait.  They come up to my desk and make order in the universe while they talk to me, sometimes handing me golden nuggets of story while they work.  There’s one in each class who takes responsibility for tidying the Zen garden.
3. The satisfying alignment of planets in the mornings lately.  And Orion standing watch.
4. My Humans of New York Stories book came in the mail a couple days ago.  I would like to just sit in a little cocoon and pore through it.
5. Sugar maples.

May we walk in Beauty!

Because

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I think I have written before about how my poems often want to begin with the word so, as if I am beginning right in the middle of the conversation that you and I are having, and the poem itself is a continuation of thought rather than its own new thing.  Lately, when a poem starts to shape itself in the back of my brain, it wants to begin with because.  Do my poems want to justify themselves?  Defend their need to be?  Or are they themselves trying to explain the world to me?  Because the maple tree caught fire against the blue sky. . .  Because you were listening to the owl in the early morning. . .  The oddest thing about this particular compulsion is that when I look back to my poems at this time last year, because is a featured word there, too.  I wonder if October seeks for reasons.

Because October seeks a reason,
because the owl called down that crescent of a moon,
because I cannot get those words you said
to settle down in the room of my head.

Because of the way the stories grow inside us,
telling themselves in our sleep,
waiting to be taken by the hand
and led into the golden glare
of October afternoons.

Gratitude List:
1. October
2. Digging out of the hole
3. Sleep
4. Wrist warmers
5. Inhabiting the story

May we walk in Beauty!  Because.

The Contemplative Muscle

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Not much time to focus on poems these days.  A small boy needs Mama time.  A cat needs a snuggle that cannot handle a computer.  I feel a need to keep working the contemplative muscles, so here is a little bit of free association for the morning.

In my head every poem begins
“This is the story. . .”
Inside my heart every story starts out
“She lived at the edge of a great, dark forest.”

What did you do when the song began?
Did you huddle beneath the leaves in the bears’ den
or step into the sunny clearing,
trusting the shining threads that fell upon your ears?

Gratitude List:
1. Sleeping in past 6:30
2. My current reading stack: Ruth Gendler’s Book of Qualities, Madeleine L’Engle’s Walking on Water, and Mary Oliver’s Felicity.
3. Sweater weather
4. Embracing the transitions
5. Story

May we walk in Beauty!

Gratitude and Praise

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Gratitude List:
1. The first school events for the year are happening today.  First is a computer system training, and I always feel like I can use more training on the computer details.  And it will be delightful to see colleagues again.  In the evening is the New Student Orientation.  I’ll be sorry to miss my own children’s back-to-school night, but I’m really excited to get the room looking welcoming and friendly, and then to start meeting some of my new students and their parents.
2. Richard Rohr’s Mystics series.  I have always been drawing to the writings of the mystics, to their poetry, to the stories of their lives, but it’s only recently, in this series, that I feel as though I am beginning to understand a little of what a contemplative life might look like.
3. The Village that is helping us to raise our children: grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins, friends, farm community, and teachers.  Tonight they will meet the teachers who will be with them through this year.  I am trying to get in touch with the anxiety I feel on behalf of my children: Will the teachers like them?  Will they be kind?  Will they understand my kids’ quirks?  Will they laugh with them?  This is one of those turn-around moments: So often, I think in terms of being the teacher that my students need; today, I commit to considering how I can be the teacher that mu students’ parents need me to be for their beloved young people.
4. Old friends and new ones.  I love you all.
5. The hunger, the ache, the longing for Beauty.

May we walk in Beauty!

Here is the second of the Psalms that I am writing for this series at my church.  One of my favorite ways to write poetry is to have an idea that burns in me, and then to suggest to that idea that it has a particular pathway to follow in order to come outside to play, and this project has three.  The parameters of this project are that the poems are: 1) They’re to be Psalms (I am free to interpret that as I choose–I am trying to make the language Psalm-like), 2) They each have a theme (desire, laments, praise, thanksgiving. . .), 3) They fit the Confessional moment in the church service.  Last August I was writing a short poem a day for a postcard project.  I didn’t do that one this year, but I am really grateful for this one: I am discovering that even when life is really busy, having a specific poetic task in the back of my head helps to frame the contemplative work of a season.

Psalm: Praise
10 August 2015

Yours is the music that enters our hearts.
Delight of you enlivens our voices to join in the song.
We are born to worship our Maker.

The world is awash in color and music;
your works are enkindled in sparkle and dazzle.
Every bright bird, each flashing star,
the chirp of the cricket and drone of cicada,
roaring waterfall, quivering leaf–
all of creation sings your glory.

We have only to look up and outward,
and wonder will fill our mouths with praise.

Yet daily our hands reach out
for wealth and power and fame,
instead of rising to praise you.

Our eyes are set on the glitter and shine
of all the distractions that we have made,
and not on your grace and your beauty.

Our voices turn to bitter complaint,
to quarrels and bluster and grumbling,
instead of joining creation’s constant hymn
of praise to the Creator.

O God of wonder and beauty and grace,
open the eyes of our hearts,
awaken our senses to all you have made,
that our spirits may rise in wonder,
that our voices may open in song,
that our days may be filled with praise.