Poetry Prompts

Poem a Day: 11

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today’s Prompts were New World, and Control.

The Crone Speaks
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

How will you enter the new world when you get there?
How will you even know you when you have arrived?
Will a score of gleaming knights on black stallions
ride across a causeway, trumpets blaring?
Will the forest path end abruptly at the top of a windy cliff
high above a roiling green sea?
Will there be a hidden doorway behind a veil of vines
in the back corner of a neglected garden?

I see how it is with you, Princess.
You knock on the door of my cottage—
so brave of you to come to the witch for advice.
You’ve got all the steps memorized, don’t you?. Admit it.

One: Learn to spin and to weave.
Bake bread. Learn to sing.
Speak the truth, but in stories.

Two: Take a walk in the woods,
though all have warned you against it.
Don’t forget to put into your pocket
the doll your mother gave you.

Three: Be kind to the Old One
sitting at the crossroad
who asks for your bread.

Four: Offer your service to the crone
who lives in the cottage
made of wishes and bones.

You’re a conscientious follower of the tales, you are.
No leaf unturned, no story left untold.
You have folded your heart
into an origami bird, ready for flying.

The only crumb you missed
on the way to the house of the witch
is this one: The whole point,
my dear—the sole purpose
of this journey
is that you learn one thing—
You must relinquish your control.
Offer the story to the birds who come
to collect the crumbs on the pathway.
The Old One who asks bread of you
seeks not the loaf you have carefully prepared
for the purpose, but the one
you’ve been saving for yourself.
Your mother’s doll will offer good advice,
but the tool you most need you will find on the way.

This story, your story, isn’t intended
to follow the formula you studied with such care.
The truth you found so dear in all the others
will not guide the plot of your own.
The Guide you seek might be a tree,
or a stone, or a wide shallow river.
Find your own signposts.
Seek your own star.
Learn your own recipes
for kindness and bread.
And please, close the door on your way out.

Poem a Day: 10

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The Prompts Today are Washing Dishes (which I am choosing to interpret as general quotidian household living) and There was a _______ Who ______. I needed to get away from the brooding abstractions of yesterday and into something decidedly surreal, which is where I am usually most comfortable. I come home to magical realism when I lose my writer’s voice. I feel like I am catching my stride again.

There Was a Woman Who Swallowed the Moon
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

There once was a woman who swallowed the moon.
I will not tell you that I know her.
I will not tell you that this is a lie.

I knew a woman who swallowed the moon,
felt the ice and the fire of it slide down her spine.
(No, not her throat.)
How it slid down her spine.
How it sizzled. How it burned.

I once knew a woman who swallowed a lie.
Felt it explode in her belly like stars.
Felt how her own light dimmed
and almost went out.
Girl, was she ever a mess!

I know a woman who lives in a house,
and this is how she exists in that house:
She sews things together.
She makes knots in strings.
She throws words in the air
to see which ones fall together.
She wanders down labyrinth hallways
weaving her fingerprints into all that she passes.
She steals words. This woman is a thief of words.
Just listen:

There once was a woman who wept a river.
I will not say if the river is tears.
I will not tell you about the mud,
and the stones, and the sycamore.
But this I can say:
when the weeping was done,
the river flowed through her house.
The words bobbed in the flow,
and the lie was extinguished,
and the moon was a boat she climbed into.

There once was a woman who sailed on the moon.
This is how she wailed.
This is how she moaned.
This is how she danced.
This is how she trailed a net behind her
to rescue the words she had lost.

Poem a Day: 9

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It’s been a really difficult day. I knew I would have to deal with it sooner or later, but I truly hadn’t prepared myself for the intense feeling of grief that would follow Governor Wolf’s announcement that all PA schools would be closed until the end of the year. I really thought that this is what would happen, and there’s even relief in no longer having to guess. Still, I kind of thought that we would have a chance to say goodbye. School continues on the virtual plane, but it will not be the same, and I am grieving.

Today’s prompts are “My House” and an ekphrastic challenge.

Home. Room.
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

I forget who distilled the idea—
that the friendships we build
here in the tangible world
create actual structures
in the spiritual realms,
that we must take the utmost care
to make our friendships sound and safe.
Who knows who will reside there
in the spaces we have crafted
with our loving attention
or callous disregard?

So, now that our classrooms are empty,
our hallways ringing with silence,
how shall we maintain the soundness
of the fine and shining edifices
we’ve been constructing in school?
We’ll need to trust that our stories,
our careful discussions,
our scholarly questions,
even our sleepiness,
our boredom,
our grinding of teeth
as we wait for the clock to run out,
will hold up this house
so we can finish the building
with elegance and style.

Poem a Day: 8

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The Long-Stretched Now
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

It’s not like a walk in the park,
this stepping through darkness
from the known space of yesterday
into the uncertain places of tomorrow.
This moment between past and future
is no open doorway with breezes flowing.
This now is a tunnel, a constricting funnel,
narrowing the horizon to a pinpoint,
thinning the potent possibilities
to this stretched limbo
of waiting.

Poem a Day: 7

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Echoes
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

“It has happened before—it will happen again.”
—last words in The Magic Cauldron by Margaret F. O’Connell

Fortune shifts her skirts.
The Wheel of Fate turns.
Fire burns the village,
but saves the traveler
lost in the wilderness.

Death has visited this valley before
and, like winter, she will come again.
Will you dance at her return
as you celebrated her passing?
Will you sing the songs on the open plain
that you whispered in the hallways of sadness?

What has once been will be again.
What you have seen will show itself
in seasons yet to come.
The bud that bursts from the twig today
will burst again from another branch
in another place, another year.
Do you hear the music now,
that echoes over the hill?

Trapped in Blue

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The prompts today are Trap, and Blue. Instead of doing a mash-up, I did two.

In the Arms of the Beloved
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

You can’t escape the blue,
the windy robe of the Beloved
draped like a veil over the rim
of your living, over the bowl
of your holiest spaces,

and scattered deep within
the indigo arms
of the tree-shadows,
indigo bluer than soul,
pathways striping the
afternoon green, leading
you home to the arms
of your most desired Mystery.

Trapped in the Anagrams
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

I am rapt. I start prattling, debating.
I stay apart: No parties. No pasta.
No prattling patter. I’m caught in the strata.
No matter, I rap and I mutter.
This pome can’t escape
the trap and the stutter,
lodged under a tarp of ratatat blather,
of anagram chatter.

Poem a Day: 5

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The prompts for today are Inspiration, and Moment. I chose to write a Skinny. You can find out more about this poetic form at The Skinny Poetry Journal.

After
(a skinny)
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

There will be a moment in the After
when
we
hug
again
when
laughter
returns
when
the After will be there in a moment.

Poem a Day: 4

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Nursery Rhyme for the New Plague
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

Ring around the rosie,
ashes, down we fall.
London Bridge is tumbling down.
Mirror on the wall:

I wish I may, I wish I might
see how my garden grows,
upstairs and downstairs
and a pocketful of rose.

Plague Doctor! Plague Doctor!
Whither shall I wander?
Only in your pumpkin shell
and to the gate. No further.

Poem a Day: 3

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Today’s two prompts were Blossoms and Follow ______.

I’m not really happy with this one. I got caught on the hook of the rhythm and I couldn’t tear myself loose, so I followed the trail. I followed the blossoms, I guess.

Follow the Blossoms
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

Step, Golden Child, onto the pathway:
follow the blossoms strewn on the pebbles.
Pink-flowering trees and golden-bloomed bushes
line the trail that calls you to wander.

Follow the blossoms wherever they lead you.
Heed only the call of aroma and color
as your feet take the rocky trail into the wild-lands,
away from the village, away from the hearth-fires.

The stories will tell of your innocent spirit,
naive, how you trusted the universe,
never believing that anything
out in the wildwood could harm you.

But you, like the Fool, have kept your eyes open.
You know of the risks, you know of the shadows,
but something else calls you to step beyond boundaries
out to the wildwood, where dangers await you.

Ahead of you, waiting around every bend in the pathway,
are challengers, riddles and questions to answer,
witches to work for and riders to follow.
Now you will have come to the edge of your trial.

Step, Golden Child, into the clearing.
Now you are nearing the challenge you came for.
This is the moment you’ve trained your whole life for,
to follow the blossoms to where they may lead you.

Poem a Day: 2

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Today’s Poetic Asides prompt is “space.” My friend Linda’s prompt is “silver bullet.”

Faithless
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

These days we divine by numbers
and watch the spiral uncoil,
no longer lazy and languid,
but each day adding the sum
of an earlier day to the new total—
n = (n-1) + (n-3)—
like a poisoned Fibonacci sequence
with hiccups, unraveling into space.

And the madman on the television
is huckstering promises of easy endings
and fantastic fortunes, a silver bullet
for every ill, anything to raise his ratings,

and meanwhile the lions of jazz
are dying of the virus, the poor get poorer
and the sick get sicker, and the hospitals
are scrambling for supplies.

Rogue churches crowd sanctuaries,
passing the virus instead of the peace,
putting their faith in a man
who has proved himself faithless
time again and time again.

No lies, no arrogant bluster,
no matter how they will it so,
will save us now.

Perhaps this is a new survival of the fittest,
where fitness means a willingness
to listen to the science,
instead of the autocratic mumbling
of this fool of a leader
whose god may indeed
roar to life again come Easter–
the Great God Mammon,
trailing behind him
thousands of dying souls in his wake.