Poems

Guest Poet

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

In response to my suggestion this morning to write a poem to cheer yourself up, my friend Cheryl Alvarez wrote this tender poem.  Thank you, Bright One!

Personal Choices

Work with the wind and the darkness.
They are your peace.
Hold tight the sunshine when it peeks from behind the clouds
to kiss your beautiful cheek.
Embrace the touch of the one who loves you most
For she knows your soul like no other.
Sing the songs of the birds, they are your harmony.
Today the pain will live among the kisses and melodies.
Let them dance with your tears.

Gratitude List:
1.  Reconciling, clearing the air
2.  The color cobalt
3.  Ancestors
4.  Poet-friends
5.  Leftovers

May we walk in Beauty!

Song for Brigid’s Day

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Song for Brigid’s Day

Do you feel how the world comes alive?
How even underneath its coat of snow,
inside the bright crystals of the ice,
something in the Earth is stirring?

Within your own eyes I see it rising–
in this breath,
and now this one–
the Dreamer is awakening.

The dawn has come,
spreading its golden road before you,
asking, “Will you step upon the pathway?”

As you move out onto the road,
Brigid’s sun upon your face
will trace your outline full behind you,
defining you in the Shadow
which will be your soul’s companion
into spring.

Gratitude List:
1.  Thaw.  Mini thaw, if only that.  Gets the flow in motion.
2.  Ceremonially welcoming children into community.
3.  This moment (usually in late winter or early spring) when I suddenly notice how the children are shifting into their next developmental and growth stages.  They’re starting to look spidery, all legs and arms and teeth.  Their faces look pixie-ish, like changelings.  I remember this from when I taught school, how there came a point each year when it seemed that all the children had grown just a little beyond their boundaries, like their skeletons had suddenly stretched, how their language and expressions changed.  Today, on the backs of their shoulders, I can see their wing-buds popping.
4.  Mimi’s Banana Bread
5.  All the many different ways we are, how sometimes our challenges actually hide our truest gifts, how the One Thing that is all of us together is enriched and deepened by the individuals who are so varied and diverse.

May we walk in Beauty.

Prepositions and Polarities

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Gratitude List:
1. So many faerie diamonds a-dazzle in the sunlight on the ice on the River in the morning.
2. Prepositions
3. Holding the polarities
4. Valuing my work
5. This poem by Rilke:
I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.

I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I’ve been circling for thousands of years
and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?

May we walk in Beauty.

Last year, I read something by Rob Brezsny, in which he challenged people to look at that Rilke poem and use it as a template for their own poem.  Here’s mine for today:
I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across time and space.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.

I circle around the Mystery, around that ancient tor.
I have been circling all my many lives
and I still don’t know: am I a the dancer,
the crone, or the ineffable fool?

Winter Balances

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

A quick little poem.
I am of two minds about winter.

One moment:
Enough, I say!  Enough
of the suffocating darkness,
of the cold that drives me
into my bed, a-quiver.
Enough of the river
frozen halfway to stone.
Enough of the bone-chilling
mind-numbing ache of it.

Then, sun on the snow,
a-sparkle, a-dazzle,
glinting ferociously:
Here is your light!
Bathe in it, draw it in,
into your marrow,
carry it deep in your heart,
in the depths, in the shadows.

Gratitude List:
1.  The way the winter sun sparkles through the bathroom window at Radiance and hits the Mary Oliver poem about summer.
2.  Talking it over
3.  The gift of vulnerability.  I want to be always strong, strong like you.  And then you open your heart and show me: “Here is the way.  Here are the places that are fearful to look upon.”  I have so much to learn.
4.  Healing energy like that bright winter sun, shimmering all around.
5.  Assessing and tweaking

May we walk in Beauty.

Bridges

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

In Honor of Ruby Bridges, Who Walked a Gauntlet and Turned it Into a Bridge

She did not click her ruby heels
and walk across that bridge of rainbow
home to Kansas. No, this one had the ruby
in her heart, and set her black patent leathers
schoolward, with federal marshals
at her corners, like framing a house.

She made a bridge, this one.
She might have quaked–
who wouldn’t, with the vitriol
of a nation tossed her way
like the tomatoes on the wall
in the Rockwell version?–but
she walked her pathway daily,
built that bridge with daily walking.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Ruby Bridges
2.  Martin Luther King, Jr.
3.  Rosa Parks
4.  All those who fought and marches and sang and endured to bring about civil rights in our country.
5.  People still doing the work to confront and transform racist thinking in self, community, nation

May we walk in Beauty.

How it Begins

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

 

Have you caught the rustle of wings

as the train rushes through,
hardly slowing to stop at the station?

Have you felt the breath in your ear
as the quiet sun leaps from the ridge
and touches your face like a lover?

Have you noticed the shadow that darts
just at the edge of your vision
as the river flows with purpose
under your ancient bridge?

And suddenly, before you–
before you can take another breath,
the madness is upon you,
the craving has taken you,
the pen is in your hand,
the words glow and bleed
beneath your fingers.

Gratitude List:
1.  Major kitchen renovations that cost less than $200.
2.  Book Faeries.  They keep coming back to this list.  After last night’s discussion of My Side of the Mountain, we got the recommendation for the lovely book We Were Tired Of Living in a House, which we have checked out of the library and which we love.  That reminded me of the books that one of our Book Faeries gave us last year: Miss Twiggley’s Tree, and Andrew Henry’s Meadow.  I am beginning to find great hope for us all when there’s such a theme running through children’s literature of people living outside of civilization.
3.  Grandma Jane’s stories.  And poems.  And songs.  A little boy was too shy to appear to be listening, but he followed it all with an eager heart despite his quiet face.
4.  Dandelion wine
5.  New ideas blazing through

May we walk in Beauty.

The Light of Day

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

2014 January 021

Where did you go when you
walked through the veil?  Whose

candles lit your eyes?  And how
did you bear the singing of the stars,

streaming all around you as the whole
roaring cosmos rushed by?  Did you dream

of the egg of the universe?  Did you
wonder at the bright door of the moon?

When did you see it, the pathway,
the portal, the light inescapable?

And when did you become the light
that sparkles over the snowdrifts, the

breeze that stirs the soft feathers of the wren,
the murmur of the creek as it flows through the valley?

Gratitude List:
1.  Jane’s marvelous memory for poetic recitation.  She might ask me the same thing three times in five minutes, but she just might recite half of Hiawatha from memory.
2.  Brooke Gladstone’s interview with Cyndi Lauper on On the Media today.  I will always love her iconic singing voice, but today I was utterly mesmerized by her sweet speaking voice and her accent.  I kept wanting to pull the car over and write down the things she was saying.
3.  New red fish with a big blue snail.
4.  Shelter.  I admit that this one carries a great deal of anxiety, too, as I think of those who do not have the luxury of shelter on this cold, cold night.
5.  Epiphany.  The light shines in!

Come!  Walk in the light!

Landscape Manuscript: An Experiment

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Here is a poem that is sort of off my beaten path, out of my kilter, definitely beyond my safety zone.  I started it over a year ago.  It’s a mash-up between poetry of pure sound and a villanelle.  I abandoned it after two stanzas.  Then this week, after I heard a recording on the radio of Gertrude Stein reading some of her poetry, and realizing how the simple sounds moved me deeply, I returned to it.  Here is Landscape Manuscript:

ancient spectrum glinted speculate
responsive orphan mystery spot green
digest interpret dervish deviate

elocution wild landscape percolate
inscribe revision often sigh unseen
ancient spectrum glinting speculate

wily wonders intersperse ameliorate
and if and when and should and mean
digest interpretation dervish deviate

manuscript within divine yet designate
extraordinary rendezvous eloquent serpentine
the ancients spectral glinted speculate

resist revolve re-grow restore renovate
while verdant hallway wren careen
digesting interpret dervish deviate

rushing flitter whirr beyond palpitate
the doorway opens to a realm between
ancient spectrum glinted speculate
digest interpret dervish deviate

2014 January 018

Gratitude List:
1.  Wingprints in the snow
2.  Wind in the breast feathers of the wren
3.  Family.  The Weaver Family Reunion.  I think Grandma must have been smiling tonight.
4.  Tea with honey and ginger
5.  A veritable flood of poetry on the internet in the past couple of days.  (And bonus: the chance to use the word veritable.)

May we walk in Beauty.

Illumination

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Tanka

The fields are open
to the moon and falling snow,
an old, well-worn book
the moon reads through shadows
before she drifts off to sleep.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Sharing lists of favorite books
2.  Mary Oliver’s Red Bird
3.  That garlicky guacamole my mom made–if that doesn’t send this cold running, I don’t know what will
4.  Moments of illumination
5.  Fairy Tales

May we walk in Beauty

The Marker

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 3 Comments

(on the day of the massacre of the people of the Conestoga 250 years ago)

Come with me now, Bright Souls
and we’ll sit in a circle together.
Silently a while.  Then we talk.

Light six candles
for the people of the longhouse
who died that wintry dawning.

The air is filled already
with too many words.
The day carries so many mutterings
on the wind, on the wings
of the vulture, drifting
above the broken fields.

Sheehays, Wa-a-shen,
Tee-kau-ley, Ess-canesh,
Tea-wonsha-i-ong,
Kannenquas.

If we are to keep awake,
to live in the place
where the heart stays open,
then perhaps we must look
into the teeth of the story.
Together we gaze at those shadows.
Together we speak their names.
Together we listen for the sparrow’s call.

At the place of the great stone
I did not speak their names.
I left my shell there at that place
in the glittering sun.

Some days I cannot bear the darkness,
but I will close my eyes and sing
while you keep vigil near me.
And when you falter, too,
I will have found the strength renewed
to witness the tale while you sing to me.

Perhaps you will not believe me
when I tell you: As I drove
that road toward the River,
six deer ran across blue shadows
cast by afternoon sun on snow,
over the fields to the road.
They paused a moment to watch
the golden fish of my car approach,
then slipped across Indian Marker Road
and were gone, past the still pond
and into a fringe of wood.

2013 December 105

Gratitude List:
1.  Deer running through blue shadows on a snowy field
2.  The winter slant of light, sparkling on snow
3.  Roasted Brussels Sprouts, and radishes and turnips and potatoes and carrots
4.  Snails.  Who would have thought I would love snails so?  Now that the fish has died, the snails provide much more entertainment than I would have expected.  The big blue one has doubled its size in two weeks’ time.  Their antennae are swirly.
5.  Learning to listen, to wait

May we walk in Beauty.