Poetry Prompts

Feet on Earth

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

I was going to try to get a sonnet written today, but I just couldn’t seem to make it past the first quatrain, and that was thuddy and bumpkish. It kept wanting to be six feet instead of pentameter. I’m okay with that, if only I can get it to sing a little more. So a little free-verse for my tired brain tonight, and form will happen later when I can keep my eyes open.

Arrange yourself upon the earth,
feet in the soil. Feel the magnetism
of mineral and metal, the cool pull
of mud and moss and peat.

Do not worry. Already you have learned
the ways to walk upon the air,
to bridge the chasm on a rainbow.
Now it is time again to learn
to walk with gravity.

TOMORROW’S PROMPT:
The Fool takes to the Air. She’s met Water and Earth, so tomorrow takes us around to the realm of in-spir-ation, spirit, the butterfly-wing flash of thought and idea, AHA! Sanguine and playful, air may seem to be the Fool’s primary element, but there is always more to learn.

Gratitude List:
1. Hanging out with Keri and Bobby. Bobby is a good sport!
2. Student musicians
3. Student Credo statements
4. Putting bare feet on earth
5. Ice cream and apple fritters.

May we walk in Beauty!

May All Beings Find Their Waters

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

May all beings find their Waters:
those who grind and punch,
those who crack and strike,
those who shout and crunch,
who scrape and gnash and chomp.
May Waters smooth and soothe them.

May all beings find their Waters:
those who fritter and dither,
those who flitter and twinkle,
those who flutter and pitter,
who skitter and wheedle and wheeze.
May Waters calm and caress them.

May all beings find their Waters:
those who boil and bubble,
those who smolder and steam,
those who stew and simmer
who pop and sizzle and seethe.
May Waters restore and refresh them.

May all beings find their Waters.

TOMORROW’S PROMPT:
Today the Fool wandered through the realm of Water. Tomorrow, let’s take her into the realm of Earth. What will ground her? What will support and hold her? What will nourish and sustain? Earth is the realm of that which is manifest, which is made physical. Tomorrow the Fool learns about Earth.

Gratitude List:
1. This question from Chapel this morning: What is the narrative that shapes your life? So many stories to live by, to center on.
2. Water, how it refreshes and calms and soothes
3. How the words sometimes find their way, even through a brain full of fog
4. The angle of shine in the dawn
5. Universals

May we walk in Beauty!

It’s Not So Much

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Not So Much
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

It’s not so much about whether you can control the horses,
but whether you want to take the chariot for a spin at all.
Are you ready for the change it will bring you?
Do you really have the will to leave that golden city
to shrink on the horizon of your memory?

TOMORROW’S PROMPT:
This is the time of the poetry-writing month when I begin to question whether I have the stamina to make it through. So the Chariot was a good one for me, though it is pretty slim because I am so tired.  Let’s give the Fool a bit of a rest, too. Before she moves on in her journey, let’s give her a few days to learn the Elements. Tomorrow, she’ll explore Water. Write her a water poem–journeys, dreamings, intuition, emotion, psychic insight, love, and internal wisdom. What will she learn about water?

Gratitude List:
1. Words and singing.
2. Making hot dogs at the fire pit.
3. Sleep
4. Memorizing poems
5. Intuition

May we walk in Beauty!

This is What I Mean By Forest

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

The Lover Speaks
by Beth-Weaver-Kreider

How, when I am hidden within your own deep self,
do you find your way onto your own separate path?
How can the we of us be so individual,
so unaware of the other that exists within us?

This is what I mean by the forest.
This is what I mean by the child who is lost in the woods.
Don’t you see that you are the forest of me?
That when you wander off the path,
you are in danger only of finding your truest self?
Which is me, which is us, Beloved.

TOMORROW’S PROMPT: The Fool rides the Chariot. Today, she learned about the power of polarities, the balance of opposites, and the deep power of being Beloved. Tomorrow, she must use the forces she has learned–the Elements the Magician has taught her, the Mysteries of the High Priestess, the Nurturing Life Force of the Empress, the Will of the Emperor, and the Problem-Solving and Connection-Making of the Teacher–to harness her Chariot and move it forward. Practice! Work! Will! Forward movement! Focus on the task at hand. Her steeds are spirits of storm. Or they are sphinxes. Or they are the energies of sun and moon. Or even the disparate elements of her own being. Whatever they are, she must learn to harness and direct them.

Gratitude List:
1. Driving into spring. The redbuds are blooming in Baltimore.
2. The Walters Museum. Antiquities. The Sekhmet statues, Isis, Mary, a teeny tiny Rembrandt, Wunderkammers, the meticulously-hand-copied Qurans, a Persian jug from the time of Rumi.
3. That wrong exit we took off the highway could have meant an hour of headache to find our way back, but it turned out to be a better exit than the one we had planned.
4. Nepalese lunch. Spicy, spicy, flavorful, and masala chai.
5. Architecture. Truly there are angels in the architecture.

May we walk in Beauty!

Deadnettle

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment


This one is perhaps too didactic, too prosey. I think I’ll try again to do another poem about the deadnettle as the teacher. This will stand for today, however.

The Fool stands long and silently
upon the flagstones before knocking.
She raises her hand to the knocker
and listens, as though afraid to fill
the vast and thoughtful silence.

Before she can raise the iron ring,
the door opens quietly inward.
An ancient one stands within,
welcoming the Fool with a gesture
and eyes that bid her enter.

Settling on the parlor couch
which the Teacher prepares tea,
the Fool spreads her belongings:
a notebook, a fuzzy pink hat,
and a book of angry poems.

“I need you to teach me how
to start a revolution,” she begs.
The old one raises a bushy eyebrow
and turns to the window,
gesturing out to a spring field,
purple with deadnettle, henbit,
and Gill-over-the-ground.

“There,” says the old one,
“is your revolution. Bloom.
Be medicine, for the earth
and medicine for the people.
Draw out the toxins from your soil.
Spread beauty, and beauty will spread.
Though you know you are for the plow,
bloom anyway, and prepare
to nourish the soil when you go under.”

TOMORROW’S PROMPT:
Tomorrow the Fool encounters the balance of the Lovers. Animus and Anima find each other and sense the ideal of their union. The secret inner self makes itself known, and she finds that what she has been running from is what she has been most longing for. Desire, attraction, the aching need to belong, to be understood, to be complete–all belong to the realm of the Lovers. Tomorrow, the Fool encounters the Lovers.

Gratitude List:
1. Another osprey, this morning.
2. Green
3. Weekend
4. Watching Babe with the kids.
5. A traveling day tomorrow.

May we walk in Beauty!

Let Us Waft. Let Us Be Wanton.

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment


Message from the Empress
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

In the orchard over the ridge
the trees have broken into a riot of pink,
lascivious against the rain-wet grass beneath.

Let us riot too.
Let us spread
our blooming fingers to the sky,
opening our mouths and our hearts,
meeting destruction with bloom,
with green, with simple beauty,
with overpowering fragrance.

Let us waft.
Let us be wanton.

TOMORROW’S PROMPT
The Fool still has more mentors to meet. Tomorrow she encounters the Teacher, or Hierophant. Teachers who know their jobs are compassionate facilitators of learning, nurturing the curiosity of their students, drawing out their students’ own ideas and perspectives, providing spaces for the Aha! Teachers who don’t know their jobs are judgey and demanding, offering shame and guilt instead of encouraging a desire to learn for learning’s sake. Unlike the High Priestess who guards the Mysteries from those who are not prepared to learn (until they are ready), the Teacher entices the seekers into the realm of Knowledge.

Gratitude List:
1. I still can’t quite believe last night’s spectacle. It was heart-pounding and nerve-wracking, but I am grateful I got to see it. While I was watching Ellis’s baseball practice, I heard a screeching in the sky–a bald eagle was chasing an osprey. It went after it for quite a while before it gave up the chase.
2. Turkey feather
3. Mama goose so persistent on her nest despite the storms
4. I love being part of a school where the culture is one of giving to the community and to the world. Students WANT to get involved in projects to help out other humans.  I love these young people.
5. Tomorrow is an easy-plan day. I need a light day.

May we walk in Beauty!

Will

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

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I will.

That should fill
the task list of the day.
Just say,
“I will.”

Then make that happen.
Make your will into a thing
Let it sing.
Give it ground.

Cast your boundaries around you:
east and south and west and north.
Go forth
and do your will.

TOMORROW’S PROMPT:
If we follow the patterns set out for the Fool, she usually meets the Empress before encountering the Emperor. Perhaps my own Fool’s journey took let the Subconscious take the wheel on that one–I have so many poems to edit and revise and work up that it will be more than a summer’s work to get them into workable order for publication. I need the Emperor’s good structure and boundaries. So tomorrow, let’s invoke his soul-mate the Empress: fecund and fertile, nurturing and warm, she supports the Fool’s creative nature, offers the soil and sustenance to build and make.  She embodies the archetype of the mother: fertile, nurturing, supportive, and happily creative. Tomorrow’s poem will be in her realm.

I am taking these prompts very deliberately this season, to be not only the spark of poems, but to take me deeper into contemplation, to gauge and assess where I am on my own Fool’s Journey, to look for the challengers and the allies, and those who fill both roles at once.

Gratitude List:
1. Cool breezes in the the classroom window.
2. Laughter. It’s sort of like a cool breeze coming in the window.
3. The wisdom and contemplation of poetry.
4. Rainbows
5. When they “get” it. There are some days when I feel as though I am beating my head against a wall to get some new concept across. Sometimes, even in a different class on the same day, everyone seems to get it, like I have opened a line from me to them, and they just absorb the new material like sponges. Today, with the very dry subject of citing sources in MLA 8 style, for instance.

May we walk in Wisdom and Beauty!

A Truth Once Known

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 3 Comments

I fear this may be a little disjointed, perhaps two poems in one. I wanted to bring in some of the symbols of the priestesses who offer me challenge and invitation: Mary Magdalene, Eve, Hildegard of Bingen, Marie Laveau.


Meeting the High Priestess

How do you enter? How will you come?
Will you pass through the gates in perfect love and perfect trust?
Will you push back the veil of your own free will?
Do you have clean hands and a pure heart?

Contemplate roundness: circle and arc and sphere.
She holds out the apple, the egg and the skull,
the pregnant belly of the moon,
the round face of the grail,
the spiraling ends of the scroll,
the coiling round of the python.

Speak your Truth, and enter, and the Mysteries will be revealed.
Will the Truth set you free, or will it bind you,
with your dawning knowledge, to responsibility?

For ignorance is no longer bliss,
and a Truth once known
cannot be unknown again.

TOMORROW’S PROMPT: The Fool, still heady with the mysteries of today, will meet the Emperor tomorrow. Will he be a challenger or an ally? Or both, perhaps. The Emperor makes the laws, sets the boundaries, holds you accountable. He can be willful and demanding, tyrannical when he is unevolved. But when he is truly doing his work, he creates a balance and a structure within which the Fool can experience a sense of safety. He’s the Apollo to your Dionysus, the Roman to your Greek, the outline to your ramble. What poem will you make of him or his laws and boundaries?

Gratitude List:
1. Dead nettle. Have I mentioned dead nettles lately? Fields of purple glisten in the morning dew.
2. Glory clouds on the way home from work, sunrays streaming down. Clouds. All Clouds.
3. Fried egg on toast.
4. Sun on rain-wet leaves in the woods.
5. A pair of Canada geese have chosen to make the pond their home for now. They have created an artful nest at the edge of the pond, and Mama is sitting on it.

May we walk in Beauty!

Meeting the Mage

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

Into the Woods

Sometimes you can’t see the trees for the forest.
You miss the sweep of oak, the broad arms of maple,
the proud rise of locust and poplar and pine,
because the understory closes in around you.
The briars catch and grab, the poison twists
and wanders everywhere into your pathway.

Sometimes you miss the healing tang of rose hips
there in the green tangle before you
because you’re fretting about the thorns,
licking the blood from torn and tattered fingers.
You miss the berries swelling in the brambles
as you reach to free yourself from their grasp.

But some days, when the path is muddy
and you’ve slipped for the thousandth time
back down the slippery hill trail,
your eyes will catch the bright blue
of a feather in wet leaves,
or the sparkle of a shining stone
there where your hand has reached
to push you back to your feet.

TOMORROW’S PROMPT:
Little Red had her Wolf, Snow White had her Dwarfs, and Goldilocks had her family of Bears. When the Fool enters the Wood, the first person she encounters is the Magician (the Mage, the Shaman, the Adept, the Witch). This is someone with a great deal of skill in the manipulation of the elements, someone who can make you see what you think you want to see, a creator of illusion. The Fool encounters Magic in tomorrow’s poem. My poem will be about Magic or the Magician, or the Elements, or changing consciousness at will. Will you join me?

Gratitude List:
1. Getting it done. Plugging. Deciding what I can do and can’t do, and making it work.
2. The haven of my parents’ house for grading in silence, distraction-free.
3. Music and words. Reflection and contemplation.
4. Black-out poetry–my sixth-grader is doing some for homework, and it’s lovely.
5. All the elements.

May we walk in Beauty!

The Way of the Fool

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 4 Comments

Ah, yes. Here on the first day of April, I spent the day with eight-year-olds, and am soon off to another birthday celebration with Grandma. Ah, the life of the Fool–planning it ALL in there, even if it seems impossible.

Begin your road at the ending,
as the last pathway rounds the bend.
Dance to the lip of the chasm–
place your foot upon a bridge of rainbow.
Keep your eyes upon the distant wood,
your ears tuned to the song of undine and dryad.

Remember, your road is a circle,
and everywhere you are is the start of your journey.
Your road is of water, of vision, of air,
of heartbeat, illusion, and wisdom
a pathway of fire and smoke.

Feel how the sky under your feet holds you up,
how the earth at your back is made only of dreams,
how the only way forward is light and color,
how a distant harping draws you onward.

Tomorrow’s Prompt: Let’s just keep going down the Fool’s Road, shall we? After she embarks on her Rainbow Road, the Fool enters the Enchanted Wood, where she meets a complex cast of characters, meets a variety of challenges, and develops her skills and knowledge. Today, let’s take her Into The Woods. Take a fairy tale turn or a psychological turn. Be whimsical or wise–or both: that’s the Fool for you.  My April 2 poem goes Into The Woods.

Gratitude List:
1. The world of the Fool. Stepping off the edge of the chasm into the void. Trusting the bridge.
2. The energy of eight-year-olds. Fun, playful, eager.
3. Moss and ferns in the woods. Green, green moss.
4. The play of sun through clouds.
5. Pink trees

May we walk in Beauty!