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

DSCN8664 (1)

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!

Technology

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

DSCN8692

 

Erf. Today’s prompt is to write a technology/anti-technology poem. I love to rant about technology, but I don’t know if I can whip up a poem about it in the fifteen minutes before I have to leave for school.  It’ll have to be a place-holder.

See how it serves you?
The world at your fingertips,
and that such a thrill
that we miss the cliche.

See how it frees you?
All that you need
right there in your hand.
You’re never more
than the press of a button
away from work or diversion,
but the one who breathes beside you
is now a thousand clicks away.

Gratitude List:
1. How the valleys and hollows hold the early morning mist
2. How people hold each other
3. How eyes shine with a new idea
4. How the work just gets done
5. How the air comes alive when the children sing

May we walk in Beauty!

Mistakes

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

This morning, I played catch-up, and finished the two incomplete poems for the poem-a-day challenge.  Today’s prompt is to write about a mistake, which is also a writing prompt that I have given my students today, with some great philosophical success–I wrote along with them, and this poem has emerged.

Red ink rains blood
upon the white page.
A slash, a laceration,
opening the wounded sentence
like a scalpel:
scribble, cut, and blot.
Ink on my fingers.

You should know there is
no glee in this.

My ink will run green
across the furrowed page,
teasing growth from the tender rows
of font upon the white field.
Nurture and cultivate,
seeds of new knowledge
sprouting from the even lines.
Your thoughts given form
and reaching for the sun.

Day After

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

IMG_0384

I’m a little too early for Brewer’s prompt this morning, so I’ll do one of my catch-ups.  The first day of November, he suggested a Day After Poem.

After the storm
the quiet
the twinkling hush
the pause

Then the sigh,
the quickly in-drawn breath

and then the straightening
the resolve–
first the spine
and then the inner image:

This is what needs to be done.
This is where the road goes.
This is how we carry on.

 

I also missed the United/Divided poem:

It is all about
the process of mitosis:
we will replicate
the past–doggedly, with zeal,
and then evolve the new way.

 

(Mockingbird says that I am not allowed to make comments about mediocrity at the moment, but I don’t always listen to mockingbird.  Meh.)

 

Gratitude List:
1. Yesterday’s children’s story.  I don’t think I have ever before gotten teary about the water cycle.  “Let the wind carry you, little stream.”
2. Resolve.
3. Stories at lunch yesterday.
4. Sumac / gingko / oak
5. Great horned owls calling from the poplar tree.

May we walk in Beauty!

Submerged

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

DSCN8708

I realized yesterday that if I sort of scrunch the meanings of a couple of my early November poems into the themes that Robert Lee Brewer suggests on his blog, I only have to write to extra poems to catch up to the Poem-A-Day thing.  I just can’t resist. I will get those two extras written.  Mockingbird reminds me that they don’t have to be super-poems.

Today’s prompt is to write a submerged poem.  I have been wanting to try the triversen form.

Beneath the surface of the dream
where tiny rodents skitter and run
I could feel the story rising.

There, where the memories yield their harvest,
where travelers wander deep in shadow,
I caught its scented breezes.

Inside the dreaming of the house
where rooms went on forever,
lay a village of self to explore.

Below the one about the baby
and the orphaned white kitten
flowed rivers of recognition.

What do you do
when the gods of the dreamings
offer you maps for the journey?

How will you answer
when the night-folk cry out:
“Give us the hope of our meanings!”

Gratitude List:
1. That pecan pie
2. Bridges.  Hope. Bridge of Hope
3. Breathing
4. Dream-work
5. Writing poems

May we walk in Hope!

Boiling Down

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Brewer suggests a simmer down poem today.  This may be more of an extended prose metaphor written in poetic form.

These are not the words she used,
but when you boil it down, it all came down
to: “Are you good enough, faithful enough,
like-me enough to be allowed here?”

And boil down it did.  Or up.
It boiled.  It takes a day at least
to bring that pot
to galloping roil.

And then the steam rises,
wraiths of steam,
curtains of steam
to shift the appearance of things.

***

I can’t seem to get to the simmer down part.  It seems to want to stay at a boil, and I want to get on with my day for now.  I have an itch to start it over, but there’s a small person here who wants me to read to him, and that takes precedence.

DSCN8682
If you look closely, you will see a shiny CD
that someone placed around a seedpod.
The mirror gives it a surreal look.

Gratitude List:
1. Long sleep
2. Cool November morning
3. Leaf-fall
4. Seed-fall
5. The cycle: That which dies will rise again.

May we walk in Beauty!

Whose Eyes?

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

 

DSCN8741

 

Robert Brewer suggests a “We’re Being Watched” Poem today:

When you walk in the fields,
when you wander in the woods–
sometimes you will feel it.

When you are looking closely
at the way the fern curls or
at the obscure twittering bird
hopping just out of sight
in a leafy bower or
at the way the ladybug
race-waddles around the tabletop,

when you are in the act of noticing
the way the minnows dart
in seemingly random chaos
before they form up
into an ordered school or
the way the sun illuminates
the golden of an autumn afternoon,
or the way one piece of quartz–
just one of thousands–
suddenly sparkles from the field row

Have you also noticed
that you are being noticed, too?
How the looking goes out
while drawing other looking in?
How the inner knowing eye
of all that is
is bent upon observing
the awe-inspiring creature
that is you?

 

Gratitude List:
1. The shining faces of those students last night after the play, thoughtfully and fervently discussing race and change, personal accountability, and the power of a good story to make us more deeply, compassionately human.  I am so proud to know them.
2. Story.  The power of story to bring us all to the table.
3. Grace.  Restoration.  Redemption.
4. Rose hips
5. Systems

May we walk in Beauty.