Lightbulb

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today’s prompt came late, after I had begun my school day, so I’m only getting to it now.  The prompt is to write an idea poem.

God is disruptive, he told us.
That’s a new one, I thought.

Perhaps that’s how it ought to be,
he said, not letting you settle
too deeply into the ruts,
pushing you off your perch,
disturbing your equilibrium,
subverting your comfort zone.

She chases me out into the desert,
colors me out of the lines,
thinks me out of the box.
How else should I want it,
I, who choose the savannah
over the closed cathedral?

I’m not entirely sure that this is true to me.  Perhaps for those of us who choose the fields rather than the boxes, the disruption comes in the form of those who would try to reel us in and lock us into their claustrophobic rooms.  This is actually the disruption that I experienced this past week, though I am not sure I would connect it to the message from a disruptive Godde.

Small Ones

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

DSCN8731
This was from the first of November.

No poetry prompt yet this morning.  I’ll post that later, but I have to get off to school, now.

Gratitude List:
1. New chapters in the book
2. A murmuration in the hollow
3. Hobbits.  When Tolkien needed someone to place in the face of the great rising evil in his story, he chose the small ones.  You and I are the small ones, friends.  Let’s join hands and stand together.  Let’s work together, speak together, sing and whisper and shout together.
4. Short bursts of energy in the long jog
5. A good story to listen to on the way to and from school.

May we walk in Beauty!

Ode to a Flock of Crows

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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Too much in a hurry to seek out a birdy sort of photo for today.  Here’s a picture of the late fall farm season.

On the Two-for Tuesday prompts, I usually try to combine the two pieces of the prompt, to let the opposite ideas create a dynamic tension in the poem.  Plus, I hate to feel as though I am missing out on any part of an experience.  Today’s is a little more complicated, and I might just have to settle for one piece.  We’ll see what happens.  Here’s the prompt:

 

  1. Take the phrase “Ode to a (blank),” replace the blank with a word or phrase, make the new phrase the title of your poem, and then, write your poem.
  2. Take the phrase “(blank) is for the Birds,” replace the blank with a word or phrase, make the new phrase the title of your poem, and then, write your poem.

How they wheel and settle,
wheel and settle.
Their business is their own.

When the trees along the tracks
have lost their leaves,
and reach their naked branches
into the salmon-colored sky,
their crowns fill with crows.
Connect the dots,
a web of birds fills the world.

These are the people of the wind,
the warriors of autumn.
Watching them, even I
can turn my face toward the winter.

Gratitude List:
1. The crowd of crows.  I always feel like I have to qualify this for the people who have to live more closely with them, because I, too, get tired of the purple pokeberry splotches all over my car from the starling flock in the hollow, but I love the crows that wheel and settle in the trees near the mall.  I love seeing them just as the sky is beginning to turn orange, and they dot the treetops and electrical wires.
2. Challengers.  They give you a chance to look at your internal world, and remind you to keep checking in with yourself and to be faithful to your inner truth.
3. Compassionate hearts.
(I wasn’t really going for a C theme today, but now I think I need to finish it out.)
4. Coffee.  It gets me through the morning.
5. Creativity.  Building up and creating are a great antidote to despair and rage.

May we walk in Beauty!

Haunting

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2012 February 058

Today’s prompt is to write a haunted poem.

Everything leaves its imprint,
like the stain of a leaf long-gone to soil
which moldered on the concrete walk
leaving its shadow for another season’s grace.

Your very atoms press against the air,
push through the space around you.
Why should the sense of you be gone
when you are gone?  Why shouldn’t your image
remain behind to haunt the space you filled?

When you turn a corner you will see them,
in those rooms you inhabit inside your soul,
shifting lights and shadows,
mirages or reflections.

Listen for the whispering:
“I was here. I will always be here.”

Gratitude List:
1. Richard Rohr.  Remember, it’s about grace.
2. The Subversive Jesus.  Who is throwing stones?
3. Earthshine.  Have you seen how we light up the moon, even when she is only a sliver?
4. Meeting the day.
5. You.  How you receive the world with open arms.  How you do not judge the worthiness of others or separate people into categories or close doors to keep some out and to lock others in.  How you remind me that there are still people who walk in the way of grace.

May we walk with Great Grace.

Wait for the Story

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2011 June 227

Today’s prompt is to write a ritual poem.  This is one of my favorite words.  I love internal preparations for sacred and holy moments.  Here is one pathway inward:

It’s a room that you enter, a space you create.
Settle your roots: down, down and deeper,
raising your branches out into starlight.

Breath first, the winds and the breezes,
scent of the morning, shelter of dawn,
many voices calling, whispering, singing.

Feel your fire rising,
energy lifting your spirit like flame.
Burn.  Let desire be the fuel.

The river flows through you, around you, within you:
quiet meandering, raging through rapids.
Gaze deep into pools for the answers you seek.

Stand firmly on earth.  Let it hold you and shape you.
Enter the cave which leads to your center.
Rock is your reason.  Soil is your mentor.

Enter the labyrinth, spiral to center.
You come to the crossroads, the meeting of pathways:
Rest in the shadows.  The story will find you.

 

Gratitude List:
1. Play
2. Work
3. Song
4. Art
5. Well-being

May we walk in Beauty!

Meeting The Guardian

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Girl With Death Mask, by Frida Kahlo

I have never seen this one before.  I post it today because it is one of the images that Robert Brewer offers as inspiration for writing an ekphrastic poem (a poem inspired by or connected to an image).

You have been walking through desert for centuries,
walking for hundreds of miles toward mountains.
Suddenly there in your path stands the guardian.

Every quest, every dream, every task has its challenger–
She who will stand at the gate of your destiny,
waiting to ask you the questions you came for:

What is the thing that you fear?  Can you face it?
What is the name of the monster that haunts you?
Can you look death in the eye and say, “Feed Me”?

If She reveals Herself at your parting,
you must be ready to hold what She offers you:
a small golden aster and three white-hot stones.

Gratitude List:
1. The principals at my school.  They’re thoughtful, supportive, restorative, and they have a keen and careful vision for the school community.
2. This morning a small boy asked me to do stretches with him, like they do in school every morning.  I love that his teacher is teaching them to stretch as well as to read.
3. Challengers.  I am trying really hard to turn this one into a gratitude.  Deep, deep down, I truly am actually grateful for yesterday’s challenger moment.  (Perhaps I need to do some more stretches to help that bit of gratitude bubble upward.)
4. Autumn wind: it calls me to adventure.
5. The helpers.  All those people in Paris and Beirut who ran to help, who offered safe houses, who hugged and held and helped.  It seems to be too much of a truth today that some people will lash out and try to harm.  But as much of a truth and greater is that more people will rush in to help and to heal.  May it always be so.

May we carry healing with us wherever we go.

Stones for Memory

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Carin

Today’s prompt is to write a poem about memory.

I have always envied others their power of memory.  My own is so fickle, so capricious, unreliable.  My ability to concentrate and memorize poetry or lines for a play in the present moment are, I think, above average.  I’m nowhere close to having a photographic memory, but I feel like I understand the brains of people who do.  This has served me well in the short-term.  I can quickly learn a story, hold a lesson plan, memorize a poem, prepare for a play.  But my powers of remembering in the long-term are, I think, way below the average.  I can remember very few of the teachers in my growing up years.  Even college, even grad school, even my first years of teaching–all are receding, dragged backward out of my memory.  This has always been kind of painful for me.

What I tell myself is that I live in the present so completely, that the butterfly of my personality sits so completely in the now, that I do not take my mind back enough to pull out the pieces of past and examine them, and so they flow out and away.  Perhaps this is not exactly a defect in my personality, but it remains a deep and abiding pain.  I lose the past too utterly, and I do often feel it as a personal deficiency: if only I would get my flightly brain to concentrate more often on what has gone before, perhaps I could keep it, hold on to it.  Still, I cannot make myself hold memory.  My brain is wired for this moment.

I place in the hands of Time these stones:
the story of this day,
the people I have been near to,
the songs the Fates have whispered in my ears,
the colors that haunt me.

See how they turn to mist,
how they glow for a moment–
red, then golden, then blue–
then dissipate like ash blown by a wind
before I can register
that they have lost their substance.

Where does memory go
when it flows out with the tide,
when it slips down the drain,
when it is blown out with the morning fog?

I am still the child in the forest,
walking blind through the swirling mists,
under the shadows of the great trees.
With each forward step on the trail,
a little bird flutters from the pathway behind,
a bread crumb in its beak.

Gratitude List:
1. Memory
2. Longing
3. This moment
4. The shades of dawn
5. Small moments in which to breathe.

May we walk in Beauty!

After the Owl

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

EWK 2 001

Today’s prompt is to write a poem titled “After __________”

After the owl booms in the sycamore at dawn,
after your eyes adjust to the darkness,
after you stumble through the washing and dressing,
after the flicker of lights,
after the coffee,
after the tree pose,
after the quiet reading of O’Donohue’s poem,
you arrive with your heart at the blank page.

Gratitude List:
1. Collegiality.  Working as a team.
2. Blank pages.  That is to say, fresh possibilities.
3. Blank pages.  That is to say, a chance to start fresh.
4. Wild geese and starlings
5. Figuring out how to say what I really mean to say.

May we walk in Beauty.

Animal Poem

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today’s prompt is to write an animal poem:

Sand Castle

Words race and scuttle, crabwise,
across the cluttered dunes of my brain,
leaving runes, cuneiform, in their wake,
scattering the grains of sand from place to place,
and shuffling between the shadows of the dune grass.

When I reach my hand to catch them,
they skitter down a hole or underneath a stone,
while the rude gulls laugh into the wind.

Following the Path of Grace

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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There is no prompt up yet, and I have to head to school.  I’ll do a second post later today with the poem.

Gratitude List:
1. Awakenings: Yesterday in a short story, the girl’s boyfriend and his mother offered to help in a chaotic moment at the restaurant.  The dad went out to wait in the car.  This was an incidental sentence in the story, but two of my classes stopped the story and complained about the dad.  They expect more of men these days.
2. Companionship: This bright boy sitting beside me and reading as I write.
3. Redemption. Grace. Restoration:  We don’t always live up to the possibilities.  The people we care for sometimes break or trample the trust we put in them.  Still, we find room for grace.  Today’s grace may be fragile, may be temporary, but I will nurture the hope it offers with everything I can give it, like the tiny, impossible flame we tended at the fire pit a couple weeks ago, giving it our breath, feeding it, believing it would catch.
4. Solitude: Not yet, not yet.  But last night I began my first dreamings for my contemplative solitude retreat this summer.
5. Growth: Sometimes the daily minutiae of teacher-work can make it seem like there is no growth, or that the growth is too small, too slow.  When I step back and look at the progress of students’ work from last year to this, it suddenly becomes clear, like looking at that small oak tree out on the hill.  I cannot see its day-to-day growth, but when I look at it over time, I can see the miracle of its growth.

May we walk in Beauty!