Poems

How the World Began

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Welcome to National Poetry Month!

So much to do!  I was away from home all day today, so tomorrow I will inaugurate this year’s Poetree in my dogwood.
Stacia Fleegal of the poetry blog Versify offers a challenge to read a poem a day.  I won’t put all mine on videotape, but here’s today’s attempt.
I think I will try the April Poem-A-Day Challenge again.  Today’s prompt is a two-fer: Write a Beginning poem.  Write an Ending poem.

How the World Began

In the beginning, Spider
launched herself into the spring breeze
from a rattling stalk of dried nettle

toward a skinny maple sapling.
She missed the maple.  Landed,
light-foot, in a heap of leaves

gathered around its base.
A quick scuttle upward, launched again
and through the breeze once more

to nettle stalks this time, and
the gossamer cord caught.
Then launched herself once more

into the gentle breath of wind
until she’d spun herself a world,
until she had encompassed all.

In the end, Spider gathered strands
and wove herself a spirit cloth of silver thread
to catch the wandering dreams

of mockingbirds and wild geese
passing over the chilly meadow,
following tomorrow’s sunrise.

 

Gratitude List:

1.  Flicker calling from the treetops this morning
2.  The golden flank feathers of the pheasant who walked through my parents’ lawn this afternoon, and his squeaky screen-door squawk.
3.  The Fool, dancing on the edge, willing to take risks, to laugh lightly at herself, to seek adventure.
4.  Energy.  Taking responsibility for my own, learning to sense it, to listen for it, to watch, to shift it.
5.  The smoke ring that emerged from the palo santo smudge that Nicky used this morning, how it rose so languidly through the grapevines, twisted, turned for a moment into a baby dragon, and dissipated like a mist, like a wraith.

May we walk in Beauty!

Because a crow

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

because there was a crow
there was a crow that morning
that morning in the snow
in the snow where the crocus were blooming
where the crocus had cupped their violet bowls
just yesterday around the pollen-padded bees

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Reiki
2.  Reading
3.  Rest
4.  Flow
5.  Belonging

May we walk in Beauty!

Wanton

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

For instance, the crocus and anemone
have leaked past the bricks
that line the edge of the bed.

For instance, the wind.

For instance, those people
blew in through the door,
climbed all those flights of stairs,
and sat down to tell me their stories.

For instance, it has taken me
three days to clear my yard of branches.

For instance, this joy
wanders into the house
even when the doors are closed
against the last blast of winter.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Sometimes it seems like you have to get attached to Plan B in order for the tricksy Universe to commit to making Plan A happen.  I am grateful for today’s full schedule (Plan A), and a project to do another day (Plan B).  I don’t mean to disparage the Universe by this–it keeps one on one’s toes, eh?
2.  Crocus and anemone leaking all over the yard.
3.  Hey, that snow was pretty!  No, I never thought I would use those two words in a sentence again, either.  At least not this soon.
4.  Reiki tomorrow
5.  The web of interconnection.  How the cards you draw have messages for me, too.

May we walk in Beauty!

Found Poem

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

I found this poem on page 40 of the September 2004 issue of Sojourners Magazine.  In an article by Danny Duncan Collum about Michael Moore’s then-new movie Fahrenheit 911, I circled some words and blacked out the rest.  Here is the result.  It’s a little more disjointed than I want it to be, but it’s really about playing around, seeing what sense I can make out of seeming nonsense, what happens when half-random words and phrases are created and strung together, what meaning is suggested.

DREAM

I saw Che Guevara on a day filled with omens
we went to lunch there, on the big screen
he won’t go back

I am troubling the dead
I won’t tell you this again

that didn’t happen
today he is lucky to be rooted
in this great global anthem

I pulled a few interesting quotations directly out of the article:
“The war is not meant to be won.  It is meant to be continuous.”  George Orwell
“If you let the world change you, you can change the world.”  from The Motorcycle Diaries

Gratitude List:
1.  Hearing the story through the voices of young people and children
2.  Visual Poetry
3.  Songs of journey, songs of water–“Wade in the water, children”
4.  Gentle guides through the liminal spaces
5.  Community support for unpacking uncomfortable, anxious and difficult questions, powerful questions

May we walk in Beauty!

Calling the Elements

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Prayer Bundle

Dream bundle, prayer packet, seeds of vision:
Now fire of sun
feed the fire of my energy
to do my work
to create my life.
Gentle rain
remind me of the grace
to flow with the changes
that I am calling into being.
Fierce winds and teasing breezes
carry my dreams outward
like milkweed seeds
to fall into fertile soil.
Solid stone and earth
ground me and steady me
to make my vision real.

Gratitude List:
1.  Persistence
2. Perspicacity
3. Perspective
4. Purple
5.  im-Perfections

May we walk in Beauty!

All in the Bowl

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

Into that bowl of my heart,
along with my rages and furies,
with recent betrayals,
with my crushing self-doubt,
with your anxieties and your tears

(yes, let me keep them there, too
you know as well as I do
and as well as the Universe knows
that when my crying time comes
as it unfortunately and inevitably
comes to us all
you’ll be running to catch my tears
in a bowl of your own, and not because
I hold yours now–no, it will be because
it’s who you are
it’s what you do
it’s what we do)

into just that bowl,
along with all that,
I place

a small white stone
bee, bee, bee, crocus, bee
concentric circles of friendship
the feel of the sun on my hair
deep rumbling rolls of laughter like thunder.

May we walk in Beauty.

Winter’s Last Stand

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

I know I have felt this panic before.
February has finally ambled its pokey self
right out the door and we sit on the cusp
of March which should mean spring,
but doesn’t.  What it is, is:
it’s the last month of pregnancy.
When you know and your body knows
that the next thing should be upon you
but something in the universe conspires
to keep you in the grip of what has been
just a little longer, but you know
that this one could go long.
Just like the last one did, and how will you,
how will you ever bear it?  Not one
more month, not another week, even.
Oh please, Timekeeper of the Universe,
if you know what is in me, get this child,
get this everlasting winter, get it out of me,
get it over with.  I’m ready for transition.

Gratitude List:
1.  Game night.  All generations.  Dutch Blitz tournament.  Letting our hair down.
2.  Mallard couples flirting on the pond
3.  Dusting off the tschotschkes
4.  Altar-building (which may be a repetition of #3)
5.  Rhythm of the in-breath, out-breath, pause.

May we walk in Beauty.

There Was Going to Be a Poem

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

There was going to be a poem about the little birds,
but that didn’t happen.  Of course, all the poems come back,
at some point, to the little birds, so there’s that.
And then I would have been writing about shame,
or rather, I did write about shame.  For days.
But then I never took it past the messy draft,
and so this big space opened up and then the bit about grief
started to rise like dough in the back of the oven
near the pilot light.  But I’m sort of an amateur myself
when it comes to grief.  And I don’t want experience–
please, Universe, keep me naive on that score–
but I want to know how to hold it, because it’s always there
in the soup we swim in, always edging up to someone,
somewhere.  And I want to know how to hold it,
because it is part of the essential story, yours,
and someone else’s, too.  Not just Mary watching her son
die up there on that hill.  It is, well, part of the soup.
And then there are, of course, the little birds,
and the way they hover over the flowers at sunset
or dart through the brush, whisper-like and timid.
The way shadows grow over the fields in the afternoon
and the breezes begin to settle into the hollow.

Gratitude List:
1.  Friends who, intentionally or inadvertently, light a fire under me when I need it most.
2.  Considering the semantic shading of gratefulness and gratitude.
3.  Vermilion
4.  The wild excitement of coming down the home stretch on a long-term project.
5.  Re-fashioning, re-crafting, re-purposing, re-making, and not just in the realm of the physical, you know?

May we walk in Beauty!

Birds of Skunk Hollow

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Somewhere in the wood,
mourning dove sings of desire:
“Who and who and who?”
Then, from deep in the bamboo,
the owl answers, “You, you, you.”

Gratitude List:
1.  Synchronicity.  People in very different places of my life this week have recommended that I read the very same two authors.
2.  Owl and dove
3.  Sun and thaw and thaw and thaw.
4.  Will forces
5.  Poppy jasper

May we walk in Beauty!

Transpiration

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

2014 January 103

I always have to think a moment before I say that one.
Is it transpiration or transubstantiation?
Perhaps it doesn’t matter.
The snow is transmuted before our eyes
from one sort of substance into another,
mystical and magical, a sacred event,
rising like a breath in a haze above the white fields.

Trans-spire.
Change of spirit.
Altered breath.

I know my own spirit rose,
transformed,
to watch the wraiths of haze lift
upward into blue sky
where gulls were flying
south to north and north to south.
My heart joined them in that dance.

Gratitude List:
1.  Collaborative art.  This one began as a squiggle.  “I’ll draw and you color,” said Joss.  I took a little heat for interpreting it into a drawing instead of keeping it abstract, but he’s satisfied now that it’s done.  The scanner washed out the color a little.  It’s called “Checkers Turtle climbs the ladder to the stars.”
2.  Kombucha
3.  THAW
4.  Helping out at Preschool today
5.  Left foot, right foot, breathe.

May we walk in Beauty.