Not What it Seems

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today’s prompt is to write a things-not-as-they-appear poem.  I keep going back to the Shaman Poem from March 1:

Here is how we make the world:
I will say fire and mean wisdom.
I will say wisteria and mean my thoughts are tangled.
I will say the river is flowing and mean that time is passing.
I will say grandmother’s quilt and mean that the work is love.

I will say house and mean your heart.
I will say spiderweb and mean the prayers are holding you.
I will say the eagle flies and mean my thoughts are with you.
I will say the daffodils are blooming and mean you are healing.

I will say song and mean dream.
I will say dream and mean prayer.
I will say prayer and mean poem.

 

Gratitude List:
1. My neighbor’s bank of nodding sunny daffodils.  (Say Man-who-Plants-Sunshine, and no longer mean Crusty Curmudgeon.  That one is going to take some work.)
2. Freckles on a small boy’s face.
3. A day to organize and tidy the classroom.
4. Playing outside!
5. All the poems of April.  I decided I did not have time curate a Poetree this year.  Still, the Internet is a grand Tree of Poetry.  I am loving reading everyone’s poems.

May we walk in Beauty!

Vegetables

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Today I have been given the tasks of bringing the vegetables to the family Easter dinner, and of writing a poem about vegetables.  I’m not quite sure what this is:

It hasn’t always been this way,
a hand reaching through leaves,
the light, the dark, the light,
and the quick rustle and scamper
of small creatures in the deeper shadows–

a pathway through the labyrinth
of cornstalks, row upon row
snaking along the hillside,
and the wind in the tassels–

an answer settling downward
through the dreaming,
like a leaf gently curving to earth
or a small flat stone sinking
into the shadowy depths of the pond.

 

Gratitude List:
1. Whatever that thing is that gets a poem going
2. I am surrounded by wise people, so many wise and thoughtful people
3. The puzzle–how the lights and darks fit together to make the whole
4. The color orange
5. Love wins

May we walk in Beauty!

Departure

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today’s prompt is departure.  This poem feels darker, more fatalistic, than I think I feel.  Last week, my husband mentioned that our eldest child, almost 9, is halfway through his childhood.  I think that shadowed this poem.  Still, while I don’t think the emotional tone is entirely accurate for my own state, it feels “true” at some level.

There is an art to the departure,
a craft to the act of letting go,
of settling your heart.
It’s an art.

Where do we start the grieving,
the leaving and unleaving,
separating this from that part?
Where do we start?

But when you burn it down
to its essentials, it’s all about
preparing for departure
in the end.

Perhaps you can extend
small blisses and delights,
the moments in the middle,
when you’ve lit
the brightest lights, the candles,
flames of memory,
names written on your heart.

Still, all is moving toward the ending,
veering ever to a newer,
fresher destination
where other lights will glimmer,
illuminate new memories,
new pathways, new strivings.

Departure is inevitable,
but so is arrival.

 

Gratitude List:
1. Grandma Weaver’s spinach balls
2. Hay rides (Joss and I rode the hay wagon at Flinchbaugh’s 4 times today!)
3. Wind flowers and speedwell
4. Sleeping in
5. People who keep me accountable to doing the inner work.

May we walk in Beauty!

Dea Ex Machina

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Dea Ex Machina

What we speak
we create.
Writing, we make
meaning into existence.

These words, cogs
and gears, shift
meaning to matter:

“Let there be. . .”
And there is.

And it is good.

Gratitude List:
1. The social lives of my children.  Friends.
2. All that dies and decays so that new life may rise and be nourished
3. Chocolate oatmeal cake with caramel icing
4. How words shape meaning
5. Bees

May we walk in Beauty!

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today’s prompt is to write about secrets:

Sing me that song,
the one you wrote
about the woman who
hid from her life
like a lynx in the wood.

Inscrutable.

She guarded her secrets
and melted into her shame,
hiding the flame in her heart,
holding the mystery of her name,
revealing herself to no one.

Remember the ending,
the way that she bent herself
outward one day,
opened her throat like a bird’s
and spoke a single clear note
into the morning,
how she blazed forth,
how she stretched outward,
how she dawned.

 

Gratitude List:
1. Daffodils!  When I got to school this morning, the first little ones were just opening their cups.  This afternoon I got home and the ones out front of our house were open, too.
2. Ideas–how they build and grow, build and grow
3. Chai
4. Color and texture, rhythm and pattern
5. You

May we walk in Beauty!

Here’s to the Fool!

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 4 Comments

Today’s poetry prompt is to write about resistance:

I have seen the way the world is weighted,
heard you murmuring the words
distress, despair, disgrace,
marked the way it seems the fates
conspire to place you
underneath the wagon’s wheel.

If I can try one phrase to bless
this wretched space in which you rest
between the gales and squalls,
let it be this:

May your soul be a sail.

Your spirit will resist the winds that drive you
into dusty earth or claw you from the cliff-face.

May you catch that wind and rise.
May you surprise yourself in flight.

Gratitude List:
1. The Chalice Labyrinth.  Balancing my light and my shadow.  Finding my way across the divide between the different parts of me.
2. Six deer silhouetted in the dusky moment just before dawn.
3. And then the sunrise.  I am learning my colors: magenta, chartreuse, indigo, aquamarine, tangerine.  And there’s one that’s not quite peach and not quite tangerine, something I can’t quite name yet.
4. Walking over the fields with my guys: Jon, the boys, and Fred the Cat.  And that bird: peregrine, perhaps.  Or osprey.  Long crooked wings, and white beneath, sweeping over the fields in the spring breeze.
5. Saying yes to the new thing, new growth, new learning.  Trusting, like the Fool, in the grace of wind to catch me in the leap.

May we walk in Beauty!

Poem a Day

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Tomorrow is the first day of National Poetry Month.  Despite the shift in my circumstances this year, I am going to try to participate in the poem-a-day process again.  After all, I really believe that part of teaching writing well is letting the students see their teachers working at the writing craft themselves.  As usual, I will be following Robert Lee Brewer’s prompts for the month.

Gratitude List:
1. The delight of a small person having a birthday
2. All those crocus: one golden flower among a field of violet
3. Striving, how we learn by striving
4. Generations: being in the middle at the moment
5. Rising to the occasion (perhaps this is a repeat of #3, but it’s actually a hope as well as a gratitude at the moment, so it bears repeating)

May we walk in Beauty!

Vertigo

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

2014 April 020
Last April, lichen

Sitting here in my grandmother’s chair
where she took yarn and hook,
made yards and yards of fabric
loop by precious loop
to cover her family

and reading Pinsky’s “Shirt”
about cloth, about the ones who leapt
to their death from the Triangle fire
and about Irma and her approval
of his own crisp cottons,

was it vertigo
or something else
that gave me the sudden urge
to check whether my seatbelt
is fastened securely?

Gratitude List:
1. Hike and Apple Picnic in the fields with the wee folk
2. The golden-green of the fields in sun across the bowl of the hollow
3. The delight of two happy children upgrading to the next level of bicycle
4. The Beautiful Words board and the way the students have taken to adding their own favorite beautiful words: serenity, wanderlust, wallflower, Nelson, and LOVE (“This is really the only one you need up there, Ms. Weaver-Kreider.”)
5. That sweet little hamster and how she watches for her man to come pick her up, how she gets absolutely still while he pets her

May we walk in Beauty!

Spring Spell

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Spring Spell

Bee.
Crocus.
Hocus-pocus!

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Music: Yesterday’s Beyond Ourselves concert (Good job, LMH Campus Chorale!)
2. More swans
3. Grapefruit
4. The Story continues (Yesterday’s sermon: Telling stories.  Remembering that there is always more to come.)
5. Bees!

May we walk in Beauty!

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

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There is much I would write this morning, so much I need to learn about myself today, if only I could write it out.  There is a prayer of sorts, waiting to find its way into the world, to cast its golden threads through the air.

There is a poem waiting too, about a mother and a daughter, about the house of the heart, about how I want to join with a village of women to encircle that house, to sing, to gather river water, to cook beans and rice, to comb their hair, to sit in silence, to hold their feet in our hands, to anoint them with precious oils.  Perhaps this is that poem.

Meanwhile, two boys are on the edge of battle in the background, and I must go and open the door on my day.  Here was this moment, and now it is passing, and another is coming to meet me.  All of it is holy, perhaps, even the name-calling over there on the fringes. If only I can listen closely enough, perhaps I will begin to understand a little of the song that surrounds us.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Swans!  Yesterday I saw a small flock flying westward, toward the River, as we were driving east.  There may have been twelve of them.
2. The twist of that sycamore on the corner of Walnut and Lime, spiraling upward through the forest of city buildings toward the light.
3. Tabea’s kombucha.  She has a magic touch.  I am loving this little bubbly jarful of chai-flavored deliciousness.
4. Teachers, again: Yesterday we went to the Science Festival at the Lancaster Science Factory.  There was an exhibit there which was running two 3D printers.  We were there when they started printing out a ratchet, using the exact program which NASA sent to the International Space Station a couple weeks ago.  This caught Ellis’s attention and he stood there at the table–asking questions and watching, and telling other kids about it–for most of the hour and 39 minutes that it took to print it.  The people at the table were kind and gentle teachers, understanding his quirky obsession and blessing it, delighting in his questions, and never talking down to him.  If he grows up to be a scientist or engineer, I will credit this moment as important in that.  In the end, they gave him the ratchet.
5. Kestrel on a cornstalk, wind in her feathers.

May we walk in Beauty!