Poems

Remember the Summons

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

When you wandered through that desert,
what was the summons that kept pulling you onward?
What color was the bright strand
that shimmered ever before your eyes?
What was the sound that filled your ears,
urging you not to give in
to the bone-aching weariness?
Remember it now
as you sit in this restful garden,
your hand in the cool quiet water,
breeze on your face,
the bells from the village
ringing across the valley,
in case you need it again some day.

 

Gratitude List:
1. People who are willing to gently say, “No, I think you might have it a little wrong there.”  To open up the conversation to new levels and learning.
2. Today is my first official day of school meetings.  I am actually excited to go to meetings!  New beginnings.
3. The BookWorm Frolic.  I think I might make it over there for a while after the meetings. It’s been a few years since I have been to the Frolic, but now I have a professional reason to go.
4. Those bright red waxy tips on the ends of the cedar waxwing feathers I found.
5. Beginning to learn the difference (perhaps a little) between making assumptions and using my intuition.

May we walk in Beauty!

What Shall We Do?

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

What shall we do about the rain?
I mean, this rain,
the one that is filling up my ears.

I am spilling over,
remembering the paths
the water takes to the lake,
and how it thundered
on the tin roof,
how the doves sat in the yard,
wings extended skyward
to feel its baptism.

Today is the coming-of-autumn rain,
and we will harvest in the mud.


Gratitude List:
1.  The sound of rain
2.  The healing power of laughter
3.  Hours and hours of uninterrupted time to work
4.  Deadlines–really, how else would I get anything completed?
5.  The wild way those walnut leaves are dancing in the wind.

May we walk in Beauty!

Sunlight and Feathers

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

There needs to be a word for that moment
when a particular slant of light
hits a golden butterfly wing just so
as it flutters through the hollow.

***

The feathers.  I am still finding at least one a day.  Yesterday there were five.  Two days ago, I found one at school, on the sidewalk between the parking lot and my classroom building.  One day, before I’d left the house, Alicia brought me three she’d found.  As I was pitching my tent at Nancy’s house last weekend, I found a feather.  Right there.  Last year, it lasted about a month or six weeks, a feather a day, beginning in late July.

We construct the meaning of our lives, I think.  I like to keep lots of meanings in my pockets, and take them out to look at, like bright stones.  All these feathers!  It means that I am favored by birds.  Or it’s a message not to fear the fledging, the flight I am about to take.  Or it’s a reminder to rest in the grace of air and light.  Or it means that bird-life in the hollow is healthy and vibrant.  Or it means that there is an owl who chooses my poplar tree for her feasting.  Perhaps it means that something in me is more observant in August, more apt to notice the tiny feathers in my path.  I don’t need to choose one meaning, to sort out the spiritual from the scientific, to hold one above another as the “right” and proper meaning.  I’ll hold them all, let all those pieces weave themselves into the narrative of my life.  Life’s too full of possibilities to narrow it down to one thing.

 

Gratitude List:
1. The August slant of light
2. Tiger swallowtails
3. Wild geese in flight: You do not have to be good.
4. The mysterious promise of another day
5. Baby snuggle time

May we walk in Beauty!

Questions

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

You say you don’t believe the stories the moon was telling
last night as she rose among the sparkling stars
over the rim of your feather pillow?
You say you’ve forgotten the song she sang,
the way her voice wrapped your heart
in a blanket made of spider silk?
You say you never find yourself lost and alone
and deliriously satisfied in the meadows of a dream?

Surely you have heard the singing when the rainbow arcs the sky?
Surely you have seen the pattern of the swallows’ dance above you?
Surely you can’t have missed the feel of the moon’s fingers
as she caresses your forehead on a summer night?

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
Friends, I am on the cusp of a big change, standing at the very edge of the cliff now, remembering that I have wings, but not sure that I am ready to fly.  Oh, I know the wind will catch me, and I know all will be well, but it is right and proper, I suppose, for butterflies to fill the belly in the moments before the leap.

Today is my last Friday of farm harvest for the summer.  While I will continue to fill in the cracks as I am able, Tuesday will essentially be the day I take off the farmer’s hat and put on the teacher’s hat.

I am going to try to continue to be present here on the blog through the changes, to continue to write gratitude lists, and hopefully poems, too.  But the space may get a little dusty and cobwebby from time to time as I work to figure out how my new morning schedule works, and where I can carve out writing time in my new world.

Gratitude List:
1. The morning’s rosy sky
2. Creative community: currently, this postcard project, and how one word or phrase or idea on a postcard I receive becomes the thread I grab for the next two or three poems.
3. Wings.  The fierce feeling of the wind in the eyes in the moments before leaping.
4. Last night the hamster cage was left open.  I am grateful that Jon found Afil before Fred the Cat did.
5. Shuffling.  How the pieces can fit together in many different ways.  Sometimes I get afraid to shift things around for fear I’ll set the whole thing crumbling, but new patterns begin to emerge instead, new ways of making it all work.

May we walk in Beauty!

Sentinels

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Who will tell us who we are
when the voices of the trees are silenced?
Who will give us direction
when the sentinels of the forest
can no longer tell us the way?

 

Gratitude List:
1. Trees
2. Sushi–I am still enjoying the memory of Sunday’s lunch
3. Yesterday’s feathers.  I found three yesterday.  One on the ground, another simply resting in mid-air, caught between a spiderweb and a ray of sunshine, and the third a tiny feather floating down from the sycamore tree.  I caught that one before it hit the ground.
4. Easing into the transition
5. Yesterday’s visit from Mindy and Willow.  One of the children went off in a sulk, and when small Willow saw him again, she peered up into his face and said, “Are you better now?”

May we walk in Beauty!

Remembering How to Fly

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Sometimes when the night
is practicing indigo and silence,
I remember what it was like
to fly, to quietly slip
my tenuous grip on gravity
and float
free,
to slide
upward through air.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Nancy’s magical haven of a mimosa tree.  At one moment, I saw in its misty pink-clad boughs half a dozen swallowtails, dozens of nameless little pollinator bugs, a kingbird, a goldfinch, some sort of sparrow, and a hummingbird!
2. My family is safely home from their wonderful African adventure.  Traveling vicariously is so much better than not traveling at all.
3. The peace-builders.  Some of my friends have made careers of peace-building and the work of creating peace.  I feel so inspired, to remember that all of us can shape our own work in the world to be about creating and building sustainable peace, no matter what particular job we take on.  Peace-building is the vocation.
4. Good music, good singing, good composers, good harmony.
5. Dreams of flying

May our stories heal each other.

Please Do Not Read Again

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 6 Comments

Here is my Gratitude List, first today, in case you want to read that and skip the poem.  I went to bed last night, thinking about Gaza, and woke up this morning with terrible images in my dreaming heart.  The poem comes from that.  The Gratitude List is especially difficult on these broody days.

Gratitude List:
1. The image of the labyrinth.  You walk into it, feel the turnings, the changes, relinquish pieces of yourself, and return to the world renewed.  I know I will not always be wandering in the darkness.  I know there is a purpose to the wandering.
2. The people who are doing the work.  I come back to this again and again.  Every bit of work that we do for peace is part of the larger tapestry.  Whatever steps you take will hearten and encourage someone else to pick up a thread and weave.  I have to believe that this work will yield fruit.
3. The ancestors.
4. Morning comes after night.  Again and again and again.
5. Making things with my children.  Ellis and I are making a marvelous bag.  I dragged my feet–“We have this other bag already, which will serve your purpose splendidly!”  Sad face, then: “But this bag that you are going to make for me–I can say that I designed it!”  Okay, Boy, hand me my fabric scissors.

May we walk in Beauty.  May we walk in Peace.

2013 October 108

Now for the poem.  Don’t worry about me, please.  I need to walk into this labyrinth if I am to remain honest and true to something at my center.  I am afraid of the darkness, but I am not lost in the darkness.  Let’s hold each other’s hands.

A little over a  year ago, I wrote a poem titled “Please Do Not Read This Poem.”  I suppose this is a second part to that.  I am feeling raw these days.  I want to know what is happening in the world, want to know what my work is, but I cannot bear to read the news, cannot bear the feeling that I am complicit in the feeding of the war machine.

Here it comes again,
this poem I cannot complete,
cannot write,
cannot stop writing.

I am Lady Macbeth
and my hands are stained
with the blood of thousands,
yet I cannot stop my killing.

I am caught in the calculus:
How many chortling wrens
does it take to bomb a hospital?
How many of those fine heirloom tomatoes–
the Golden Girls, the Red and Green Zebras,
the Mr. Slabaughs and the Brandywines?
How many of them are required
to blow up a school
where refugees huddle?

Most days I hear my ancestors humming,
beginning their songs in the hallways of my heart,
lining the spiraling stairways of my DNA.

They accepted death by fire and water,
they received iron bars and stone towers,
they faced the sword,
rather than give their children and their gold,
rather than offer to Caesar
what they believed
did not belong to Caesar
(or to Mars, perhaps,
what did not belong to Mars).

I lack the moral fortitude
to hold back my yearly tithe,
and face the consequence of that.

Instead, I wake in the night
and calculate the costs
of all my killings.
When Caesar receives my birdsong,
my tomatoes and my blue-eyed chicory,
one full fourth of that
is funneled to the war machine.

Every fourth stone,
every fourth feather,
every fourth sunrise
bright over the hill,
every fourth chicken egg
warm from the nest
is feeding the birth of a drone
or a bomb or a rocket,
filling the ravenous belly
of the god of war.

All this murder leaves a trail.
Those bombs that kill
the children of Gaza today
were bought from my country,
from this war-machine
that feeds off my quiet hollow,
my singing stream,
my tiny fledging hummingbirds,
my royal poplar and my sycamore.

Some days,
the singing of my ancestors
is deafening.
Some days,
I hear the pounding of cannon
and see the dust rising,
even here in this place
where sunlight flashes on birdwing.

Spiders

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

I cast a line from me to you,
to you, to you.
Catch and weave,
catch and weave.

And I receive
the lines you cast my way.
Catch and weave,
catch and weave.

Until we have a bowl,
until we have a net, a nest,
a net of hearts for one we love
to rest in, to be held.

Spiders in the corners,
we watch and listen,
we hold the lines
and tell the story
as it unfolds.

Gratitude List:
1.  Net, web, nest
2.  Dyeing–watching the new color emerge
3.  The blue eye of cornflower
4.  The way my children enter literature.  I thought The Hobbit was perhaps too much for them, but they listen and ask questions.  Now they want to venture in to The Lord of the Rings, and who am I to tell them not to.  Here we go: A Long-Expected Party.
5.  The way Jon WK keeps me laughing.  Sometime I’ll tell you the pumpernickel story.

May we walk in Beauty!

Step Away from the Gates

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 4 Comments

Yesterday was perhaps a bit of a let-down day after the high of Luna Moth Day, full of barely maskable crabbiness and low-grade anxiety.  Sigh.  I suppose we can’t always live in the realm of the sublime.  The mundane has lessons aplenty.

Worn out by the anxieties and slog of the day, I lay back in the recliner for an evening catnap, and the first part of this just sort of fluttered into my head.

Don’t sit so close to the gates of Despair, sister.
I don’t need to to tell you how the gates open inward,
suddenly drawing the shuffling masses inside the yawning arches.
I don’t need to tell you how easy it is to be carried along in the wave,
or worse, trampled by feet of those who are eager
to prove their dark visions and those who cannot
relinquish their lifelong addiction to fear.
You know them too well, these shadows.
You’ve been in that land.

Roll up your mat, gather your books,
pick up your bucketful of bright yellow flowers,
and walk twenty paces east of the gateway
to the place where a sapling grows patiently
out of the moss-covered pavements.

From this spot you will hear the faint whisper
of breezes, from faraway places
where courage is dawning.

From this breathable vantage point,
you will hear the distant shushing
of waves on the beaches
where hope will awaken.

I know why you choose your perch,
there, on the doorstep.
I know why you watch them so carefully,
tending the crowd like a garden,
why you believe yourself safe,
you, with your books and your flowers.

I know, too, how you belong there,
in that waiting crowd of restless people,
how some days your flowers turn lifeless and ashen,
how the words in your volumes, on grayest of days,
run down the pages like ink-bled tears.

Pick up your mat, I say, now before the gates open.
Turn your back on that archway.
Follow the pathway of bright white pebbles
that I laid there myself one gray day.

 

Gratitude List:
1. The way words come together to make meaning
2. The holiness of the everyday
3. Tomato sandwiches
4. Cool summer morning breezes (“. . .blowing through the jasmine in my mind.”
5. This web that we belong to.  And I don’t just mean the www, though that one has its contribution.  Can you feel how the strands connect us, how the energy runs between us?

May we walk in Beauty!

Waiting for Rain

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Smell it in the air,
feeling of impendingness,
a sense of silence,
broken moments of birdsong.
Everything is listening.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Yesterday’s music
2.  Smell of rain in the air
3.  A clean house
4.  Solutions
5.  Words, gestures, language

May we walk in Beauty!