Poetry Prompts

Argle-Bargle

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Bleeeeding

Today’s prompt is to choose a little-known English word and use it for a title. I chose two.

The Argle-Bargle of the Blatherskite
(meaningless babble of a chatterer)

I mean it when I say
that I mean what I say,
and I say what I mean,
which is to say
that I mean something.

You know you want to
want what you want
when you want it
and you know
you want it now.
Now you know it.

We’ve come this far
by coming to terms
because the terms
are endearing my dear

It’s not over ’til it’s begun
or so they say.
Red Rover, come over.
It’s over. It’s done.

Gratitude List:
1. Greeeeeeen!
2. The Deer of Skunk Hollow
3. Anticipating Oriole
4. This boy who is looking over my shoulder and conferring with me about my grammar
5. The way new poems rise

May we walk in Beauty!

Seeking the Wildest One

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Today’s prompt is to write a roundelay or and anti-form poem. I sort of pooped out on the rhyming bits and struggled to make it mean what I want to, but it was an interesting exercise. I need to practice more forms. The Wildest One is one of my names for the great mystery some people call God.

O Seeker, you must simply start,
and follow the road toward the sun.
No sign, no map, no guide, no chart
will tell you when your road’s begun.
You must enter the forest of your heart
to find your way to the Wildest One.

No sign or map, no guide or chart
will tell you when you have begun.
The search is inward, no science or art
can tell you when the journey’s done.
You just enter the forest of your heart
and find your way to the Wildest One.

The inner search is both science and art.
No one will tell you when the journey’s done.
In solitude, you’ll wander apart
from the villages where tales are spun.
You must enter the forest of the heart
if you seek to find the Wildest One.

In solitude, you’ll wander apart
from the shining village, where tales are spun,
but you’ll return to take up your part
when the journey’s over, the race is run.
You’ll walk through the forest of the heart,
seeking always the Wildest One.

Rooting

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Today’s prompt was to write an action poem. I chose rooting as my action. I am really weary, and this feels like half a poem, and raw at that, but I need to get to bed.

Rooting

Take root.
Root around.
Spread your roots
deep underground.

Breathe into your roots.
Put your feet in the earth.

Root into the deep soil of a poem,
seeking the truffles and treasures
that lie in hidden caverns of sound
and rhythm and image.

Root through the fertile ground
of a conversation to find the seeds
a new ideas, the gemstones of an open mind.

Send your taproot down,
further down,
where the soil nourishes
your burgeoning green.

Oaks

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Today’s prompt is to title the poem the name of a plant, and then to write the poem.

Oaks
(for the people who sit in their trees to stop the pipeline)

The women themselves are oaks
in this ocean of oak,
in these groves of trees–
Sycamore, Poplar, Pine–
riding their boats,
tiny houses high in the boughs of the oak trees.

Riding the waves of storm,
surfing the wind high up in the branches,
they have no safe port, no harbor,
no safe place to re-supply.
Below them, the sharks circle,
waiting for the first sign of weakness.
But their friends, too, have made a circle,
a web to hold the women who sit in the oaks.

The women are watching and waiting.

They are protectors.
They are the guardians.
They are trees and the mothers of trees.
They know the secrets of the acorn.
They know how long it takes an oak to grow.
They have the patience of mountains.

Gratitude List:
1. Warm spring weather
2. Spring breeze
3. Reading books together
4. The defenders of the earth
5. Magic

May we walk in Beauty!

A few weeks ago, I had a Facebook conversation with several friends about the books we loved as children because someone we loved read them to us. The conversation was brought on by a post by the author Kate DiCamillo, who wrote about her elementary school teacher reading her The Island of the Blue Dolphins. Kate DiCamillo is herself the author of The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane. On Friday, at the Kreutz Creek library book sale, I bought a copy of Edward Tulane. When Joss saw it, he said his Library teacher had read it to his class, and that it was one of his favorite books, and he said we were going to take a break in our reading of Susan Cooper’s Dark is Rising in order to read it. We just finished reading it now, on the porch, and even though I knew what was going to happen, even though my heart had been broken and mended with Edward’s half a dozen times already, when the absolute perfect ending happened, I went to pieces and sobbed. Oh. It is exquisite. It is now one of my favorite books, too.

Bramble and Thorn

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Today’s  prompt is to write a danger poem:

Bramble and Thorn

Now you have endangered our children.
Your insatiable greed
and your ravening thirst
bring death to their doorways
and poison their waters.
You’ve sold your souls
to any devil who can pay
and you roll across the land
with your ravening hunger,
your howls and growls of need.

So we make ourselves into brambles.
We become the thorns
that stand in your path,
make the land into a maze
that will turn you and taunt you,
send you curling back upon yourselves.
Like the wild rose and the blackberry,
we dig ourselves into the soil
and new thorns rise.
You trample us,
and our broken stubs take root.
You cut us back, and we flourish.
More and more and more of us,
we rise in your pathway.
You cannot pass.

Words I am Grateful For:
1. Harbor: safe, protective, intentional, revolutionary
2. Revolution: turning, changing, fierce
3. Fierce: loving, protective, nurturing
4. Thorn: challenge, protection, secretive
5. Wilderness: wildness, safe, free

May we walk in Beauty!

Holy Wind

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Screenshot2018-04-20at8.41.36PM
The prompt for today is to write a poem that uses a line from a poem I wrote earlier in the month.

This spiritwind, this holy breeze blows through
the hollow places of my spine,
the hallowed spaces of my bones,
through the stones of heart and kidney,
through the separated ribs,
through each molecule of blood like stars,
sparkling through the hallways
of the body, blowing down the strands
of DNA, of memory, of life force.

The Beloved blows through
with a shriving wind,
clearing the pathways
clogged by the debris
of addiction and twisted truths,
of laziness and wasted moments,
to free the caged, starving soul.

Gratitude List:
1. Earth Day chapel–everybody outside, looking at flowers and watching Mr. Sprunger fish, and petting the sheep, and making bird feeders, and listening to psalms and poetry, and learning to split wood.
2. Five deer appeared as we went outside for chapel, and ran across the hillside behind us.
3. Two phoebes were flitting in the saplings at the edge of the River.
4. This evening, playing Kube with the family as the sun began to go down.
5. The mockingbird is back and in full mockingbird mode.

May we ever walk in Beauty!

Tender Threads

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Today’s Prompt is to write a ________ Thread poem

Tender Threads

Threads of story, threads of dream,
webs stretch across vast distances,
holding the space between your story and mine,
between this heartbeat, and that one.

Silver cords of energy stitch our hearts
into a single cloth that spreads
outward, a cloth of all the threads
that we have been, from the birth
of the first grandmother
to the newest person on the planet,
one tapestry, one weaving.

Gratitude List:
1. We had a girls’ choir from a school in South Africa sing in our chapel today. It was a sublime experience.
2. A student told me that I looked like a Persian princess today. I felt exotic instead of frumpy.
3. One of my students has been going through a rough patch, and it’s been apparent in her world-weary eyes. Today she came to talk to me, and her eyes were clear and sparkly again. My own heart lifted. May she find her way into the sunshine, and home to herself.
4. Spring morning birdsong
5. The tender hearts of my Beloveds.

May we walk in Beauty!

Quotes and Notes for the Day

Thursday’s Thoughts:
People Like Us
by Robert Bly

There are more like us. All over the world
There are confused people, who can’t remember
The name of their dog when they wake up, and people
Who love God but can’t remember where
He was when they went to sleep. It’s
All right. The world cleanses itself this way.
A wrong number occurs to you in the middle
Of the night, you dial it, it rings just in time
To save the house. And the second-story man
Gets the wrong address, where the insomniac lives,
And he’s lonely, and they talk, and the thief
Goes back to college. Even in graduate school,
You can wander into the wrong classroom,
And hear great poems lovingly spoken
By the wrong professor. And you find your soul,
And greatness has a defender, and even in death you’re safe.
***
I will hold your heart
as I hold all the stories
which you’ve let slip through
the filters of your fingers.
How they are caught in my web!
—Beth Weaver-Kreider
***
“Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.” ―Frederick Buechner
***
“The words you speak become the house you live in.” ―Hafiz
***
“Humans are the most intellectually advanced animal on the planet and yet, we are destroying our only home. The window of time is very small, but I refuse to believe that we cannot solve this problem.” ―Dr. Jane Goodall
***
“Memory makes the now fully inhabitable.” ―David Whyte
***
“Things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance even after the physical contact has been severed.” ―James Frazer
***
“Which world are we trying to sustain: a resource to fulfill our desires of material prosperity, or an Earth of wonder, beauty, and sacred meaning?” — Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
***
“And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.” —John Steinbeck
***
“Crystals are living beings at the beginning of creation. All things have a frequency and a vibration.” —Nikola Tesla

PoeTree

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

Years ago, during the month of April, I kept a poetree. Two dogwood trees stand on either side of my driveway. I would hang poems from the branches of the one closest to the house. Rain and snow caused problems until I got smart and hung them in plastic sheets. Since I have been teaching school, I have not had time to tend and April poetree, except on my bulletin board in the classroom one year. The year of this photo, 2013, I called myself the laundress of poetry, hanging my fresh sheets in the sun every few days.

Today’s prompt is to write a temptation poem. This year’s poems feel more solid than some years in the past. Fewer toss-offs, fewer place-holders. Today’s poem might fit those categories, but it has a little promise, I think:

Lead me not into temptation,
not into the Faculty snack room,
not into the valley of Facebook,
not into the sleepy arms of the recliner.

Lead me not into the second pot of coffee,
not into the bargain bin at the yarn store,
not into the library book sale,
not into the place of shiny stones.

Lead me into the long afternoon walk,
into the quiet seat in the spring sunshine,
into the circle of the oriole’s song,
into the embrace of a weeping pink tree.

Lead me into a whole classroom of laughter,
into the smile of a child,
into the room of your song,
into the twinkling space of your gaze.

Gratitude List:
1. Pink
2. Yellow
3. Yellow
4. Pink
5. Pink

May we walk in Beauty!

Handing the Gift

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments


Today’s prompt is to write a love/anti-love poem. I ended the day today sort of exhausted, partly because of the incredible resistance I am getting from some students in my Creative Writing class.

I see it in your eyes when you ask the question
(the loathing, the defiant refusal to accept)
“Why do we have to study poetry?”
And in this moment I do not know how,
after all these years of this work,
to hand you this gift
that I love so deeply,
which you so staunchly refuse.

It’s about your own power,
I want to tell you,
about your power to say
exactly what you want to say,
to take that roiling mass of uncertainty
that slides out from behind the tough mask
you put on for me,
to take all that and give it words,
to sort it, to speak your truth,
to know the beauty and the strength
of your own words, to find your way
into yourself.

Now. Close your eyes and open your hands.

Gratitude List:
1. My contemplative friend Handsome Joe, how he cocks his beak to look at me as I pass. Paddling in his pool in the creek, or strolling through the green grasses of his estate.
2. The red sprouts of peonies lifting their heads by the shop.
3. The first fern fiddleheads unfurling.
4. They say that every cloud has a silver lining, but it’s their azure and indigo underbellies that capture me.
5. The challenges and delights of belonging to a community.

May we walk in Beauty!

You Are My Favorite

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment


Today’s prompt is to write a favorite poem:

You are my favorite color:
that golden shine of sun on the trees in the morning,
that deep cotton grey of dusk,
that rich mocha brown of turned earth,
that silvery sheen on blue waters.

You are my favorite sound:
the sigh of a breeze through the sycamore,
the quiet hum of a child at play,
the full-throated song of a joyful choir,
the chorus of birdfolk at dawn.

You are my favorite feeling:
this tingle of warm sun in spring chill,
this shiver of the spine at a memory,
this sigh of soft satin on the inside of the wrist,
this ease of rest at the end of an aching day.