Poetry Prompts

Perilous

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment
Art by Beth and AI.

Today’s Poetry Prompt, suggested by Robert Lee Brewer of Writers Digest, is Peril. This one feels incomplete. . .

Oh Lady of the Labyrinth,
Mother of Midnight,
Queen of the star-strewn Heavens,
only now do I know that I need not pray
that the way will be windswept and winsome,
that the dreams will be joyful and golden.

For it was on the perilous path that you found me,
and the moment I stumbled you came to my aid.
When the road was encumbered by shadows,
you grasped my hand and said, “Follow.”

Gratitude List:
1. An absolutely pleasant day
2. All the colors of autumn
3. Riding Rail Bikes at Seven Valleys
4. Cats in the family
5. An extra hour
May we walk in Beauty.

“Safety is not the absence of threat.
It is the presence of connection.” —Gabor Maté

“Mercy is the willingness to enter into the chaos of another.” —James Keenan

Expose yourself to your deepest fear. After that, you are free.” —Jim Morrison

“You need not wade through the mists and bogs to reach the moon.
You need not climb a ladder of cobweb.
You need not ride the stallions that wicker in the sea’s pounding surf.

Draw back the curtain and open the window.
Breathe the bracing air and listen:
The whinny of an owl, the click of the bat,
The grunt of a buck and the distant roar of the train.

The full moon will spill a milky road before you.
That is all the pathway you will need.”
—Beth Weaver-Kreider

“The word is the making of the world.” —Wallace Stevens

“Through the empty branches the sky remains.
It is what you have.” —Rainer Maria Rilke

“The leaves of the tree become as pages of the Sacred Book to one who is awake.”
—Hazrat Inayat Khan

“Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.” —Albert Einstein

“I must remind you that starving a child is violence. Suppressing a culture is violence. Neglecting school children is violence. Punishing a mother and her family is violence. Discrimination against a working man is violence. Ghetto housing is violence. Ignoring medical need is violence. Contempt for poverty is violence.” —Coretta Scott King

“When you feel the suffering of every living thing in your own heart, that is consciousness.” —Bhagavad Gita

“And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
―Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart.”
―Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“Just that,” said the fox. “To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world….”
―Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“It is such a mysterious place, the land of tears.”
―Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me. You will always be my friend. You will want to laugh with me. And you will sometimes open your window, so, for that pleasure . . . And your friends will be properly astonished to see you laughing as you look up at the sky! Then you will say to them, ‘Yes, the stars always make me laugh!’ And they will think you are crazy. It will be a very shabby trick that I shall have played on you…”
―Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.”
―Naomi Shihab Nye

The Song

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Art by me and the AI. Robert Lee Brewer’s prompt today was to write a poem that begins, In the. . .

In the hard times, you could still hear the song.
In the skeleton days when all you could do
was to drop out of bed in the quiet dawn to pray,
even then, you could hear it, the gentle melody
underneath the jangling and dissonant voices
that clamored for attention in your head.
Even when your insides were displayed on street corners
for all to see, the hopeful notes floated around you,
small birds that only you could sense, like angels,
leading you through the chanting crowds.

In the house made of sunlight and bone,
where your spirit found shelter
after the ravening creatures of malice and spite
had picked your very soul clean of flesh and sinew,
there, in the liquid autumn air, the music expanded,
mending the breakage, tending the spaces
like cobwebs, repairing the breaches, weaving
the song through the aching gaps, declaring you whole.

Gratitude List:

  • The calm and peace of Friday evenings
  • That autumn slant of light
  • Leaves drifting gently down
  • I get by with a little help from my friends
  • Music

May we walk in Beauty!

(Today’s quotations come in pairs that interact with each other)
“Both when we fall and when we get up again, we are kept in the same precious love.” ―Julian of Norwich
*
“What if I should discover that the poorest of the beggars and the most impudent of offenders are all within me; and that I stand in need of the alms of my own kindness, that I, myself, am the enemy who must be loved–what then?” ―Carl Jung
*****
“I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift should be curiosity.”
―Eleanor Roosevelt
*
“If I had influence with the good fairy, I would ask that her gift to each child be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life.”
―Rachel Carson
****
“Your problem is you’re too busy holding onto your unworthiness.” ―Ram Dass
*
“In giving of yourself, you will discover a whole new life full of meaning and love.” ―Cesar Chavez
****
“While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
―Eugene V. Debs
*
“I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready, and when the people are eatin’ the stuff they raise and livin’ in the houses they build – I’ll be there, too. Ma Joad: I don’t understand it, Tom. Tom Joad: Me, neither, Ma, but – just somethin’ I been thinkin’ about.”
―Tom Joad, from the movie Grapes of Wrath

Misguided

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment
Art: “A New Beginning” by Beth and the AI. Prompt: “Write a Misguided poem,” by Robert Lee Brewer of The Writers Digest.

Take the misbegotten moment,
the misinterpreted glance,
the misguided misapprehension,
and the miserable chance.
Take the mistakes you’ve made,
the misjudgments.
Take the mischief and the misaim.
Then take out your finest eraser,
and start all over again.

Gratitude List:
1. Chances to start over
2. The second half
3. Revision
4. StoryCorps
5. Lemon Drops
May we walk in Beauty!

“Awake, my dear. Be kind to your sleeping heart. Take it out into the vast fields of light and let it breathe.” —Hafiz

“Mercy is the willingness to enter into the chaos of another.” —James Keenan

“The heavens are sweeping us along in a cyclone of stars.” —Teilhard de Chardin

“Sometimes I hear it talking. The light of the sunflower was one language, but there are others more audible. Once, in the redwood forest, I heard a beat, something like a drum or heart coming from. the ground and trees and wind. That underground current stirred a kind of knowing inside me, a kinship and longing, a dream barely remembered that disappeared back to the body. Another time, there was the booming voice of an ocean storm thundering from far out at sea, telling about what lived in the distance, about the rough water that would arrive, wave after wave revealing the disturbance at center.

Tonight I walk. I am watching the sky. I think of the people who came before me and how they knew the placement of stars in the sky, watched the moving sun long and hard enough to witness how a certain angle of light touched a stone only once a year. Without written records, they knew the gods of every night, the small, fine details of the world around them and of immensity above them.

Walking, I can almost hear the redwoods beating. And the oceans are above me here, rolling clouds, heavy and dark, considering snow. On the dry, red road, I pass the place of the sunflower, that dark and secret location where creation took place. I wonder if it will return this summer, if it will multiply and move up to the other stand of flowers in a territorial struggle.

It’s winter and there is smoke from the fires. The square, lighted windows of houses are fogging over. It is a world of elemental attention, of all things working together, listening to what speaks in the blood. Whichever road I follow, I walk in the land of many gods, and they love and eat one another. Walking, I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.” —Linda Hogan

Expose yourself to your deepest fear. After that, you are free.” —Jim Morrison

Joseph Campbell: “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure that you seek.”

Sweetness

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Day two of Poem a Day! Prompt (Sweetness) from Robert Lee Brewer at Writers Digest, and art from my own collaboration with Wombo Dream AI.

Birth of a Poem

A poem is not born
until it hits the air,
until you’ve tasted
its sugar on your tongue,
shaped it with your lips,
felt the hiss and slither
as the words meet the soft,
sweet curl of your ears,
those precious shells,
which yearn for music,
which long for golden truth.

Gratitude List for All Souls:
1. Lizzie and Lura and Marian and Mammy
2. Wangari and Rachel
3. Harriet and Sojourner and Dorothy
4. The Witches and Rebels and Heretics
5. Annwyn and Nathan and Merle and Carl
. . .and all those bright spirits gathered around
our remembering hearts.
May we walk in Bright Memory.

“No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member—
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds—
November!”
—Thomas Hood, No!

“I could not be a poet without the natural world. Someone else could. But not me. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple.” —Mary Oliver

“Nourish beginnings, let us nourish beginnings. Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest. The blessing is in the seed.” —Muriel Rukeyser

“We discover the Earth in the depths of our being through participation, not through isolation or exploitation. We are most ourselves when we are most intimate with the rivers and mountains and woodlands, with the sun and the moon and the stars in the heavens… We belong here. Our home is here. The excitement and fulfillment of our lives is here… Just as we are fulfilled in our communion with the larger community to which we belong, so too the universe itself and every being in the universe is fulfilled in us.” —Thomas Berry, The Sacred Universe

Words of Howard Zinn:
“We don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world. Even when we don’t ‘win,’ there is fun and fulfillment in the fact that we have been involved, with other good people, in something worthwhile. We need hope.

“An optimist isn’t necessarily a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the dark of our time. To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something.

“If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”

Bill Maher:
“Christians, I know, I’m sorry; I know you hate this and you want to square this circle, but you can’t. I’m not even judging you. I’m just saying, logically, if you ignore every single thing Jesus commanded you to do, you’re not a Christian. You’re just auditing. You’re not Christ’s followers. You’re just fans.”

“Come, come, whoever you are. Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving. It doesn’t matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair. Come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times. Come, yet again, come, come.” ―Jelaluddin Rumi

Beginnings and Endings

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

It’s November! Time for a Poem a Day! I am following Robert Lee Brewer’s Prompts over at The Writer’s Digest. Today, he suggests a Beginnings/Endings poem (or one or the other). The art is a collaboration between me and the Wombo Dream AI.

Another Month to Feed
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

Perhaps it’s always rabbits
at the mouth of the month
because beginnings come
so often timidly, twitching noses
in the shadows, marking a small
moment in the never-ending
spiral of time, one birth in
an incandescent infinity
of new beginnings, yet
another meal for the wolf
of the month to come.

Gratitude List:
1. Poetry prompts
2. The two children who held my hands in the woods yesterday.
3. Social/emotional learning and teaching
4. Finding fresh purpose
5. Miracles
May we walk, oh so tenderly, in Beauty!

“I am passionate about everything in my life, first and foremost, passionate about ideas. And that’s a dangerous person to be in this society, not just because I’m a woman, but because it’s such a fundamentally anti-intellectual, anti-critical thinking society.” —bell hooks

“Bless the light and the darkness, the love and the fear.” —Rabbi Olivier BenHaim

“It doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like, so long as somebody loves you.” —Roald Dahl, The Witches

“For women who are tied to the moon, love alone is not enough. We insist each day wrap its knuckles through our heart strings and pull. The lows, the joy, the poetry. We dance at the edge of a cliff. You have fallen off. So it goes. You will climb up again.” —Anais Nin

“The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

“In the morning I went out to pick dandelions and was drawn to the Echinacea patch where I found a honeybee clinging to one of the pink flowers. She seemed in distress, confused and weak. She kept falling off the flower and then catching herself in midair and flying dizzily back. She kept trying to get back to work, to collect her pollen and nectar to take home to the hive to make honey but she was getting weaker and weaker and then she fell into my hand. I knew she would never make it back to her hive. For the next half hour she rested in my palm, her life slowly ebbing away as a thunderstorm started to brew. I sat on the earth waiting for death with her. The lightning flashed over the mountains, a family of turkeys slowly walked the ridge, a wild dog keyed into what was happening circled past us. The trees appeared startlingly vivid and conscious as the wind blew up and the thunder cracked and then her death was finished. She was gone forever. But in her going she taught me to take every moment as my last flower, do what I could and make something sweet of it.” —Layne Redmond

“Let me seek, then, the gift of silence, and poverty, and solitude, where everything I touch is turned into prayer: where the sky is my prayer, the birds are my prayer, the wind in the trees is my prayer, for God is all in all.” —Thomas Merton

“Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.” —Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, author of Frankenstein

Audre Lorde:
“For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.
.
Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.
.
As they become known and accepted to ourselves, our feelings, and the honest exploration of them, become sanctuaries and fortresses and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas, the house of difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action. Right now, I could name at least ten ideas I would have once found intolerable or incomprehensible and frightening, except as they came after dreams and poems. This is not idle fantasy, but the true meaning of “it feels right to me.” We can train ourselves to respect our feelings, and to discipline (transpose) them into a language that matches those feelings so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream or vision, it is the skeleton architecture of our lives.”

“Wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving.” —Khalil Gibran

Horizon

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

On one of the poem-a-day prompts lists one of my students dug up at the beginning of April, the prompt for the 25th is to write a poem about the word Horizon. The events of my April have meant I have fallen a few days behind on my poeming. (Well, that’s my excuse anyway!)

Horizon
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

The horizon
lies on
the edge of
the world

and you never
can reach it
though you seek
with your whole heart.

It is always
a day’s journey
away from the place
where you start.

Gratitude List:
1. The way the horizon always leads onward
2. Guests. Guests require a little housecleaning, and a clean house is nice. Plus, guests are nice.
3. The hostas are coming up!
4. I think I saw my friend the oriole this morning. It could have been something else with the sun hitting it just so. But he should be here any day now. I am listening for you, Friend!
5. How poetry holds feelings.
May we walk in Beauty!

“To love, my brothers and sisters, does not mean we have to agree. But maybe agreeing to love is the greatest agreement. And the only one that ultimately matters, because it makes a future possible.” —Michael B. Curry

“The path isn’t a straight line; it’s a spiral. You continually come back to things you thought you understood and see deeper truths.” —Barry H. Gillespie

“Immature people crave and demand moral certainty: This is bad, this is good. Kids and adolescents struggle to find a sure moral foothold in this bewildering world; they long to feel they’re on the winning side, or at least a member of the team. To them, heroic fantasy may offer a vision of moral clarity. Unfortunately, the pretended Battle Between (unquestioned) Good and (unexamined) Evil obscures instead of clarifying, serving as a mere excuse for violence — as brainless, useless, and base as aggressive war in the real world.” —Ursula K Le Guin

“There is room for you at our table, if you choose to join us.” —Starhawk, The Fifth Sacred Thing

“For beautiful to happen, the beautiful has got to be seen.” —from the musical “Ordinary Days”

“You will be found.” —from the musical “Dear Evan Hansen”
****”
“How do you become the person you’ve forgotten you ever were?” —from the musical “Anastasia”

“The universe is not made up of atoms; it’s made up of tiny stories.” ―Joseph Gordon-Levitt

To all the children
by Thomas Berry

To the children who swim beneath
The waves of the sea, to those who live in
The soils of the Earth, to the children of the flowers
In the meadows and the trees of the forest,
To all those children who roam over the land
And the winged ones who fly with the winds,
To the human children too, that all the children
May go together into the future in the full
Diversity of their regional communities.

Carl Jung: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

“Do not be satisfied with the stories that come before you. Unfold your own myth.” ―Rumi (Barks)

“You are the storyteller of your own life, and you can create your own legend, or not.” ―Isabel Allende

“Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy – the experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.” ―Bréne Brown, Wholehearted

Rebirth

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment
A magnolia leaf from my classroom. Didn’t quite make it safely home. But now it’s here, and you can receive its message too.

I’m behind again on the daily poetry, so I’ll pull another from a previous day. The prompt was to write a 3-5-line poem which was a story of loss and redemption. I cheated (it was my own prompt anyway) and made it six lines. Not sure where the angels came from, but there they were. I’ll receive them.

Rebirth
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

The onslaught may feel like it’s carrying you away,
but in the morning, though fear remains,
though pain, though worry,
though the guardian still waits at the gateway,
Resolve will awaken within you,
and you will have the strength of angels at your back.

Listening to Mamuse’s “We Shall Be Known By the Company We Keep” over and over and over again these days. If that’s the case, Friends, I am in a good place. The company of You is so wise, so tender, so articulate, so compassionate, so justice-serving, so playful, so winsome, so deep.

Gratitude List:
1. “Always we begin again,” said St. Benedict, and I am finding his message a simple and comforting reminder.
2. So many people committed to justice and democracy and goodness and saving the planet.
3. Pink, pink, pink, pink trees!
4. Dawn chorus
5. Wise friends. Such wise friends.
May we walk in Beauty!

“The great affair, the love affair with life, is to live as variously as possible, to groom one’s curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred, climb aboard, and gallop over the thick, sun-struck hills every day. Where there is no risk, the emotional terrain is flat and unyielding, and, despite all its dimensions, valleys, pinnacles, and detours, life will seem to have none of its magnificent geography, only a length. It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.” —Diane Ackerman

“I take literally the statement in the Gospel of John that God loves the world. I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love. I believe that divine love, incarnate and indwelling in the world, summons the world always toward wholeness, which ultimately is reconciliation and atonement with God.” ―Wendell Berry

“A crone is a woman who has found her voice. She knows that silence is consent. This is a quality that makes older women feared. It is not the innocent voice of a child who says, “the emperor has no clothes,” but the fierce truthfulness of the crone that is the voice of reality. Both the innocent child and the crone are seeing through the illusions, denials, or “spin” to the truth. But the crone knows about the deception and its consequences, and it angers her. Her fierceness springs from the heart, gives her courage, makes her a force to be reckoned with.” —Jean Shinoda Bolen

“Go as far as you can see; when you get there you’ll be able to see farther.” —Thomas Carlyle

“At the end of the day, I’d rather be excluded for who I include than included for who I exclude.” —Eston Williams

“Free me. . .from words, that I may discover the signified, the word unspoken in the darkness.” —Byzantine Prayer

“Father, Mother, God,
Thank you for your presence
during the hard and mean days.
For then we have you to lean upon.
For those who have no voice,
we ask you to speak.
For those who feel unworthy,
we ask you to pour your love out
in waterfalls of tenderness.
For those who live in pain,
we ask you to bathe them
in the river of your healing.
Dear Creator, You, the borderless
sea of substance, we ask you to give to all the
world that which we need most—Peace.”
—Maya Angelou

“This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.”
—Leonard Bernstein

Stillness. One of the doors
into the temple.”
—Mary Oliver

“If you just learn a single trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view… Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.” —Harper Lee

“Some days, you don’t know whether
you are stepping on earth or water or air.
Place each foot carefully before you
and offer your weight gratefully to
whatever it is that holds you.”
—Beth Weaver-Kreider

Is a Rose a Rose?

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment
This is actually not a rose, but a carnation, I believe. Visual irony?

I wrote this one a week or so ago. It’s a form called a zejel, which requires this rhyme scheme in the stanzas: AAA, BBBA, CCCA, DDDA. I decided to edge it toward a sort of pantoum by actually repeating the A lines in the last three stanzas.

Is a Rose a Rose?
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

I’ve always thought a rose is a rose.
What you see is what you get, the saying goes,
so what a person is ought to be the part that shows.

Each heart must hold its own singular reality
and secrets belong to the keeper of the keys of that city,
no matter how lonesome or rageful or gritty.
Still, what a person is is eventually the part that shows.

Our innermost isness, no matter how hidden,
will come out in daily living, often unbidden,
to show our deep truths, holy or forbidden.
What you see (looking deeper) is what you get, the saying goes.

A secret self that is anchored by Love
will, under duress, be inspired to move
and to act accordingly, thus-and-such, and thereof:
A rose ought to be, in its essence, a rose.

Gratitude List:
1. People who are what they seem no matter what keep private to themselves.
2. The Ones Who Love. Sometimes you leap, and it’s not a net that appears, but a thousand waiting arms.
3. Possibilities. Oh, the possibilities!
4. These sunny days and frothy pink trees.
5. Birdsong, and poems about birdsong.
May we walk justly, with mercy, and humbly.

“You know you’re on the right path if your capacity for holding paradox expands, your sense of humor broadens, your commitment to justice deepens, your compassion for and protection of life grows, and your love of people transcends race, color, creed, tribe, religion, politics and sexual [orientation].” —Rabbi Rami Shapiro

“It’s not fair,” Linus said, staring off into nothing. “The way some people can be. But as long as you remember to be just and kind like I know you are, what those people think won’t matter in the long run. Hate is loud, but I think you’ll learn it’s because it’s only a few people shouting, desperate to be heard. You might not ever be able to change their minds, but as long as you remember you’re not alone, you will overcome.” —excerpt from The House in the Cerulean Sea, T.J. Klune

“As truly as God is our father, so truly is God our mother.” —Julian of Norwich

“Had I not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people’s.” ―Anaïs Nin

“Come forth into the light of things, Let Nature be your teacher.” ―William Wordsworth

Forever Oneness,
who sings to us in silence,
who teaches us through each other.
Guide my steps with strength and wisdom.
May I see the lessons as I walk,
honor the Purpose of all things.
Help me touch with respect,
always speak from behind my eyes.
Let me observe, not judge.
May I cause no harm,
and leave music and beauty after my visit.
When I return to forever
may the circle be closed
and the spiral be broader.
―Bee Lake (Aboriginal poet)

“We’re so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it is all about.”
―Joseph Campbell

“I can’t tell you why your story is important, only that it is.” ―Mara Eve Robbins

“Time is like dragons.
They are both imaginary, yet can eat you anyway.” —The Cryptonaturalist

Heather Havrilesky:
“The antidote to a world that tells us sick stories about ourselves and and poisons us into thinking we’re helpless is believing in our world and in our communities and in ourselves.”

Stand Clear

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment
St. Martha tames the Dragon, by Beth and AI

Today, I wrote an ekphrastic poem for my prompt: ekphrasis is a Greek term referring to a written description of a piece of visual art.

I used Andrea Kowch’s piece titled “In My Mind” for my inspiration for today’s poem. You’ll have to click the link to her page there. I feel like this is too much of a re-publishing for me to put it here without permissions. Instead, I put up an AI collab of St. Martha taming the dragon, which has some of the similar feeling. But please check out Kowch’s piece that inspired my poem for today, and explore more of her good, good work.

Gratitude List:
1. For the last two days, in the green field in the dogleg of Ducktown, three deer have stood watching us as we passed in the dawn gloaming.
2. My comfortable shoes
3. Poetry
4. A new red shirt
5. The loving care and concern of people who rush to care for someone in need.
May we walk justly, in mercy, humbly, in Beauty!

“Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.” —Terry Pratchett

The Happy Virus
by Hafez
I caught the happy virus last night
When I was out singing beneath the stars.
It is remarkably contagious—
So kiss me.

“It is our mind, and that alone,
that chains us or sets us free.” —Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind.” —George Orwell

“We must live from the center.” —Bahauddin, father of Rumi

“Some days I am more wolf than woman and I am still learning how to stop apologising for my wild.” —Nikita Gill

“Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.” —Albert Einstein

“Writer’s block results from
too much head. Cut off your head.
Pegasus, poetry, was born of Medusa
when her head was cut off.
You have to be reckless when writing.
Be as crazy as your conscience allows.”
—Joseph Campbell

“Ask yourself: Have you been kind today? Make kindness your daily modus operandi and change your world.” —Annie Lennox

Weathering

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Some days feel like the lightning rods of days. Today has been one of those. People attacking people and institutions I love. Attacking me. People working together to answer with love, to hold out our arms, to support each other. Good, hard work–Good Good Work. It’s wearying. And still, there’s the daily and the mundane work to get done in the midst of this other.

I am glad I’ve chosen the path of poetry this month to get me back to the inner work of writing and get me out of my own head.

I don’t know how to withstand the onslaught of the culture wars, especially when they begin so directly to affect me and those I love. Offer love. Offer a hand. Offer a word of wisdom or care. Hold steady. Be the conduit for the Holy One.

My own path, while embracing a wide and universal understanding of the spiritual, is grounded in the Anabaptist Christian tradition. I don’t think I have ever asked myself so frequently, “What would Jesus do?” as I have in the past week, the past months. Is this the moment to turn over tables? Is this the moment to offer stories? Is this the moment to bear witness silently? Is this the moment to ignore the ones who rage and spit, and simply do the Work I am called to do?

Today’s poem form is the mondo. I used this form to try to express some of this inner processing:

Gratitude List:
1. Friends who walk with each other and share the burden.
2. So many kinds of daffodils! (Read that Wordsworth poem over and over and over).
3. Finding center. Holding center.
4. The open-armed ones who welcome all to the table.
5. Writing again. This fog that has held me in the past six months lifts faster as I find my way back to words.
May we walk Justly, in Mercy, and Humbly–in Beauty!

“We write to taste life twice.” —Anais Nin

“My wish for you is that you continue. Continue to be who and how you are, to astonish a mean world with your acts of kindness.” —Maya Angelou

“If you pour a handful of salt into a cup of water, the water becomes undrinkable. But if you pour the salt into a river, people can continue to draw the water to cook, wash, and drink. The river is immense, and it has the capacity to receive, embrace, and transform. When our hearts are small, our understanding and compassion are limited, and we suffer. We can’t accept or tolerate others and their shortcomings, and we demand that they change. But when our hearts expand, these same things don’t make us suffer anymore. We have a lot of understanding and compassion and can embrace others. We accept others as they are, and then they have a chance to transform.” —Thich Nhat Hanh

“I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.” —Martin Luther King, Jr.

“When we plant trees, we plant the seeds of peace and seeds of hope.” —Wangari Maathai