Poems

Song of Opossum

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

<Prompt 6: Write a Perspective Poem about a person who works at or visits a place you like to visit.  I don’t really go anywhere much at all.  I like to be at the farm, so I am writing my perspective poem about someone who visits Goldfinch Farm.>

I walk when grey dusk is upon us
night–grey as my fog-colored fur

quietly creeping
stealing so silently
through the dried grasses
over the hill

Dusk, when the day-folk have gone away
out of the fields and away from the woods edge

night-folk come foraging
searching for sustenance
gleaning the harvest
left in the fields

What is that?  Scent of cat
up a tree, suddenly
whisk foot, white foot
I stand frozen in moonshadows

The owl is hunting over in the oak grove
raccoon rustles through the last field of corn

eyes agleam in moonlight
silver fur like starlight
sniff and scratch and nibble
homeward I wander

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Editing and revising
2.  Compassion
3.  Perspective
4.  Eating with friends at the picnic table under the sycamore
5.  Listening

May we walk in Beauty.

Nests

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment
<Prompt 5: Write a poem about something concealed/write about something unconcealed.>
All through the verdant season
the nest-builders have concealed
within the thick cover of leaves
their great treasures, crafted
of vines and twigs, cobwebs, grasses:
their work of the season’s passing.
Then, mystery and secrecy–
the eggs, dappled and speckled,
and suddenly, ravenous nestlings.
But now, all is revealed.  The trees
have dropped their golden skirts
about their ankles, and the secret is spilled.
There, in the yellow maple,
a random twiggy pile of mockingbird nest.
A bedraggled clump of matted grass
at the furthest dangling limb of the poplar
is all that remains of oriole’s art.
In the tree at the top of Ducktown Road,
a gray orb, nest of a colony of paper wasps.
“Through the empty branches the sky remains.
It is what you have.”
–Rainer Maria Rilke
In the sky, those rippled clouds,
ribs of the gods, and birds gathering,
riding the sky-road south for winter.
2013 November 001

Mockingbird’s secret

(Blank) Sheet, a Grouchy Little Poem

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

<Prompt 4: (Blank) Sheet> I really did have this one finished yesterday, but I fell asleep in the recliner while I was waiting for my turn at the computer.  I am having a little more trouble trusting Mockingbird this year.  I want my poems to be just a little more polished before I post them.  I don’t want to go with first impulses, which feel flimsy and light.  Instead of trusting that writing will bring the inspiration, I am waiting around and pushing for it.  Then I get stuck.  So this poem turned into a complaint.  Here goes:

A sure-fire method to freeze the gears,
to gum up the fine workings of the Muse:

Tell the poet to write
about the Blank Sheet.

The Blank Sheet is the yawning chasm
we stare into, the poet’s dark
and treacherous Void.
It draws me in like a moth
to the challenge and the danger.

Tell me not to think about the elephant
and suddenly everywhere I see an elephant.

 

I need to keep reminding myself that the first time I did this, lots of days were duds.  The whole point is to keep the lines open, to keep fluid and hopeful, to begin to shape the inner work of the daily life into pieces of a poetic puzzle that fit together.  Even though something in me is cringing at my early attempts, this grouchy little poem is exactly what I needed today, even if it won’t make the chapbook.  Today’s prompt (I will try to be more prompt in execution) is a two-fer: Write a concealed poem.  Unconceal everything.

2013 November 008

Gratitude List:
1.  Pushing through
2.  Those leaves!  I feel as I if I died and went to Vermont.
3.  Rilke
4.  Elephants
5.  Endings and Beginnings: Today begins the last week of CSA shares for the 2014 season.  Now we gear up for December shares.

May we walk in Beauty.

Begin Again

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

(Poem-A-Day Prompt 3: “The Last Time I was Here)

Here we go again,
me and Mike Finnegan,
and some old Benedictine:
Begin again,
begin again,
begin again.

I thought I had evolved
past the brooding and the sulk,
past lack of will, lack of resolve.
Begin again,
begin again,
begin again.

The last time I was here,
the emptiness was vaster,
I was drawn to the disaster.
Begin again,
begin again,
begin again.

Today that distant light
seems brighter, closer, right
around the corner.
Begin again,
begin again,
begin again.

Beginning November Poem-a-Day Challenge

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Here goes.  I’m diving in to the Poem-a-Day challenge two days late.  These first two or three might be a little more slapdash than even Mockingbird would approve, but that’s the way it will have to be.  Please feel free to join me!  I’d be honored if you want to post your own poems here.  Or you can follow the prompts and post on Brewer’s blog itself.

Day One Prompt: Write an appearing poem.

Riddle: a tanka

Down halls of dream, through
tattered veils of old stories
no fury, no fear
only the question of where
the next riddle will appear.

Day Two Prompt:  Write a News of the Day poem.  This one is a found poem, right from the source.  I want to practice more found poetry, though in a hurry to finish a poetry quota is probably not the moment to do it.  Mockingbird says to stop apologizing and get on with it.

Bomb: a found poem
source

Chief said police
will continue to its investigation,
the fourth in the past two weeks.
Post-9/11, we cannot turn a blind eye.
Nothing was found.

Students were evacuated
after the threat was found
written in a bathroom at 8:21 a.m.

Students and staff were returning
to finish out the day.
Nothing was found.

The district has notified parents.
Check back for updates.

 

Moving right along, here is the one I will work on today, and hopefully post by this evening or tomorrow morning:  Day 3 Prompt.

2013 November 019

Gratitude List:
1.  Glittering autumn sunlight
2.  An extra hour of sleep
3.  Punctuation
4.  Challenging myself
5.  Community rituals of remembrance

May we walk in Beauty.

Finding Poetry

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Found Poem
Source: Joss Weaver-Kreider

I just saw a tree
that had no leaf left

and

at first I thought
it was a giant feather.

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This is an old photo, from December,
but it shows some naked feathery trees.

Gratitude List
1.  Ten Years of Goldfinch Farm.  It has gone by in a flash.  It has been forever.  Happy Birthday, Bright Spot!
2.  Prayer.  Or singing.  Or writing poems.  Or drawing.  Or listening.  Or looking.  Or magic.  Whatever you call it, the energy that is the connective tissue of the Universe, the Multiverse.
3.  Four-part harmony
4.  Standing in the borderlands, looking around, and realizing that I’m ready for the journey.
5.  This contemplative morning time all to myself.

May we walk in Beauty, in Love

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

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

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

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

“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.