Poems

Just a Minute

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

After yesterday’s lai, my friend Mara sent me a link to an interview with the poet Cathy Smith Bowers, who worked with another short form, the minute.

A minute is three stanzas in length, each of twenty syllables (60 total, like a minute).  The rhyme scheme is aabb, ccdd, eeff.  And the kicker is that the meter is iambic: ba-dum-ba-dum-ba-dum-ba-dum.  Sort of like Shakespeare, but with fewer feet.

This one’s tricky.  Even when the meter and rhyme seem to come easily, it’s a real challenge to get it to dance rather than stumble.  But Mockingbird says that you learn to dance by taking those first stumbling steps.

Out in the dawn, a misty sea
in walnut tree
a silent crow
will dream of snow

will ruffle feathers in the chill
will wait until
the first bright ray
begins the day

then with a final shake will rise
from branch to skies
and this will be
a memory

Ha!  Well, that was fun.  Mockingbird says I am not supposed to make fun of it or try to explain its inadequacy, so I’ll let it stand for today’s poem.

2013 October 081

Gratitude List:
1.  Getting a card in the mail!  Just for hello-and-I-love-you.  What a delight.  And there was a tiny picture of an artist’s palette on the back that inspired Ellis to draw and draw and draw.  Thank you, Auntie Mary!  I love you, too!
2.  New soft. warm rug underfoot
3.  Faery-light.  I don’t know another word for it–the way the vegetables glow and shine from within, even when there is no obvious light source nearby.  Yesterday, the tomatoes seemed to glow from within.  Radishes, potatoes, carrots, when they’re wet, take on a light and color that seem to be beyond the capacity of the available light to create.
4.  New perspectives.  Rearranging the furniture, literally and figuratively.
5.  The way frost outlines every leaf, every blade of grass, every bud and vein.  My children say Jack Frost is just a made-up thing, but I’ve seen some of his best work.

Beauty all around us.

Back to Form

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2013 October 058

Winter is coming on, and I am feeling the pull to go inward, to explore new poetic forms.  This one I discovered on Robert Brewer’s Poetic Asides blog.  It is a French form called a lai.  It’s good for me to get back to the anxious thrill of writing something for the fun and playfulness of it, and not simply because there are words knocking at the back door of my head asking to be let out.

It’s 9 lines.  The 5-syllable lines (1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8) are rhyme A, and the others are 2 syllables and are rhyme B.  Here goes:

Either moon or frost
has whitely embossed
the field.
I wake, having crossed
the sea of sleep, tossed,
concealed
within my own lost
ark.  Now, waking’s cost.
I yield.

Hmmm.  Perhaps I ought to have been a little more intentional about choosing rhymes instead of diving in head first and letting the rhymes find me.  Nah.  That was fun.  Sort of like a tanka, but with the added imperative of rhyme.  And that happy little skip in the last lines of the triads could be used comically or very seriously, I think.  I started with the first thing that jumped into my head, so I was stuck with -ost as my major rhyme.  Initially I typed “grass” instead of “field,” but was limited by that rhyme.  Now that’s an exercise to wake me up.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  The artistic power of limits
2.  Colored pencils
3.  Warm rug for winter
4.  Cleaning the attic
5.  Civility

Beauty All Around Us.

Mushrooms

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Today we praise mushrooms,
whose dreams alone we see,
the fruiting body, the stalk,
the periscope eye
sneaking a peek above earth.

Here’s to mycelium, to messages,
to the network threading beneath us,
hyphae, like delicate fairy hair,
highways of information, of connection.
Sprawling communities of fungi
lurking unseen beneath our blind feet,
silently doing their work.

Here’s to twinkling spores that glimmer
and drift through a single shaft
of sunlight on the woods floor,
to the tender gills which carry the spores,
to the wanton gift.

A blessing on the unseen,
the not-there but suddenly appearing,
the wisdom of the fungus,
of rot, of humus, of mold,
of breaking it down.
Gratitude List:
1.  The creative force of children
2.  Mushrooms popping up everywhere
3.  Sunshine, blue sky
4.  Wren
5.  Listening

May we walk in Beauty!

Do Something That Won’t Compute

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“So, friends,” says Wendell Berry in The Mad Farmer Liberation Front, “every day do something / that won’t compute.”

The politicos and the war-mongers and the marketing gurus and the ad execs and the creators of glitzy trash and junk, they all think they’ve got us figured out.  They think they know what we want.  We’re the consumers, and they’re going to give us something to consume, whether it be a genetically engineered piece of sweet junk filled with high fructose corn syrup, a mindless screen diversion or a satisfying show of martial power.  And if we’re the consumers in the equation, they’re the ones who are raking in the dough.  At an ever-increasing, alarming rate of speed.

Every day, let’s choose to do something that doesn’t fit that model.  Let’s be the Makers, the Creators, the Designers of our own health, happiness, well-being.  The Crafters of our own delicious world.  Let’s make our own entertainment, be responsible for our own health, learn to love the taste of real unprocessed food, design our own lives according to our own stories.

“As soon as the generals and the politicos / can predict the motions of your mind,” says Wendell Berry, “lose it. Leave it as a sign / to mark the false trail, the way / you didn’t go. Be like the fox / who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction. / Practice resurrection.”

Gratitude List:
1.  A little sun and blue sky yesterday.  A day without rain.
2.  The bright and earnest energy of the activists at the anti-GMO rally.
3.  Natasha’s spot-on speech from the rally: Kill the Beast
4.  Stuffed shells
5.  Snuggles

May we walk in Beauty.

Growing Up

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Listen for the songs
of the thousand grandmothers
who sing in your blood
whose voices echo in halls
of wakening memory.

2013 October 019

Gratitude List:
1.  That sunset.  Magenta and true orange, indigo and aquamarine.  The sunset-washed clouds were like wispy versions of mammatus clouds.
2.  Volunteer Fire Department.  Our local FDs are all staffed by volunteers.  These people are amazing.  We had a ride last night in a fire engine at the Wrightsville FD Open House.  It was like being inside the Tardis–bigger on the inside.
3.  Aging.  Looking at some photos of myself yesterday, I noticed how my face is showing my age, and I was happy about that.  Something about seeing pictures of myself in my late teens and early twenties makes me a little uncomfortable–I seem so raw and unripe and unseasoned.  Yesterday I realized that I feel comfortable in my skin–creaky knees and achy back and marks of age–in ways that I don’t think I ever have before.  I am incredibly grateful for that.  I just might start calling myself a grown-up pretty soon.
4.  Rain.
5.  Giving myself permission.

May we walk in Beauty.

Haiku and Tanka

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2013 October 044

I am snuggling a boy and a cat in my lap at the moment: benefits of a cool morning.   Makes typing a challenge, though.

Here are a couple poems that walked into my head yesterday.  The first is a tanka, inspired by my friend Mara.  I thought the second was going to be a tanka, too, but while I was waiting for the last two lines to emerge, I realized it was already a haiku.

 

TANKA
See there! In your palm
are the rivers of story,
of constellations,
dragonfly wings, the pathways
of the heart: love, grief, desire.

HAIKU
The now-naked arms
of the walnut tree cradle
the newly-born moon.

Gratitude List:
1.  Autumn birdsong in the hollow
2.  Listening
3.  Constructing my own life
4.  Breakfast
5.  Tiny Poems

May we walk in Beauty.

Yellow Leaf, White Horse

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Yellow leaf
The evening breeze
A white horse is walking between the sun’s rays
Cloud on a hill

Because as goodbye approaches
my heart is practicing the hole

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Ellis, our resident picky eater, ate ten green beans for supper.  And we only asked him to eat two.
2.  Conversations about this thing that is and isn’t faith or belief or religion
3.  Cicadas lulling me to sleep
4.  Getting my hair done.  I do it so infrequently, and it feels SOOO good. It’s therapy.  Really.
5.  Hope.  Even if Pema suggests I abandon it.  I can’t.  Won’t.

May we walk in Beauty.

Prodigal as Love

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yellow walnut leaves
twist and twirl silently earthward
lavishly giving themselves to breeze, to breath
prodigal as love

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Dreams.  And dreams.
2.  Passages, fledgings, relinquishments
3.  Raisin bread toasted
4.  Swallows migrating through
5.  New rhythms

May we walk in Beauty.

Luna, Hen, and Living in the Village

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2013 August 270 2013 August 274

Gratitude List:
1.  Luna Moth
2.  Halo of morning sun around a black hen on dewy grass coming to greet me in the morning.
3. The parenting village–we don’t have to do it all alone, don’t have to figure it out all alone.
4.  Dissatisfaction and satisfaction: a two-sided coin.  Right now, I am exploring dissatisfaction as a means to avoid complacency and getting-stuck-in-a-rut-ness.
5.  Ellis is reading Calvin and Hobbes cartoons to Joss.

May we walk in Beauty, fly in Beauty.

Slumber

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Zentangle 16August13 001

Gratitude List:
1.  Butterflies.  Yes, Mara Eve, there are butterflies!  Even a few monarchs.  All is not lost.
2.  Moments
3.  Coming to terms
4.  Slumber
5.  Tomato sandwiches

May we walk in Beauty.