When I feel my brain turning off, and I still have a poem to write, I decide I’ll go experimental and pull a found poem out of a magazine.
Found Tanka by Beth Weaver-Kreider (found in Oct 2025 Anabaptist World)
people went dancing we stayed home, riveted by borrowed refusals honoring evolving lives to radical transitions
Gratitude List: 1. Grades are submitted for the first Trimester! And it isn’t even 2 am the night before they’re due! 2. Warm shower on a chilly night 3. Anticipating the elder child coming home for the holiday 4. Book Club–such fine, wise women 5. I’m sleeping really well lately. Maybe it’s because it’s new moon May we walk in Beauty!
Sometimes in the gray box of November a door lets in a small light
Sometimes the small light of November makes a space for another breath
Sometimes a quick breath in November makes me feel like I just might make it through
Gratitude List: 1. Lancaster’s ExtraGive 2. The team from church who created the Trans Day of Remembrance Vigil last night 3. Friday 4. Healing stories 5. Making things May we walk in Beauty!
Quiet Piggy Sit down Piggy I do not permit a Piggy to speak Piggies should be seen and not heard Shake it Piggy Bake me a cake Piggy
Awaken Piggy Make a break for it Piggy Stand up Piggy Speak out Piggy Sing Piggy Riot Piggy
Today instead of a gratitude list, I want to mark Trans Day of Remembrance, begun in 1999 by trans activist Gwendolyn Ann Smith to commemorate the murder the previous year of Black trans performer Rita Hester.
In the past three years, our community in Lancaster area has lost at least five young trans people to suicide.
Proportionally, more trans people lose their lives to violence than just about any other group in the US.
What can you do to create safe and brave spaces where everyone is completely free to be themselves and live their truth?
Today’s poem is based on a daily meditation I have been doing with my rosary. I think of each decade as representing one of the elements–Earth, Air, Fire, Water, and Spirit–and I map those elements onto the pentacle points of my body: left hand is Earth, left foot is Air, and so on. During the past few weeks, I have been visualizing flowers at those points, as I visualize myself opening to what the day will bring to me.
Meditation by Beth Weaver-Kreider
My left hand holds a stone bowl of rich dark loam and a green shoot that breaks from a seed, emerges, grows, blossoms, fruits, drops seed, and dies only to emerge again, a surging and an ebbing.
A witch hazel tree grows from my left foot, strings of yellow blossom teased by breezes, fruits rattling in the the wind, dragon mouths snapping open
My right foot is on fire with a flamboyant in bloom, the tree’s red petals blazing and alive with bees, the hum of bees like waves of crackling flame flowering into a raging bonfire of blossom.
A blue lotus floats in the pond of my right palm, its single stem anchored deep within me, enchanting blue nymph, serene in her bowl
A field of purple cosmos bursts from my brow, opening my third eye, the home of spirit, petals opening to the sun, gathering the light.
Gratitude List: 1. Flowers 2. Meditations 3. Bouncing back 4. The fierce delight of Middle Schoolers playing gaga ball 5. Doing Crossword puzzles with my seniors May we walk in Beauty!
Oh, goodness. I am exhausted tonight. Here’s a placeholder poem. One of my rules is that the poems don’t have to be polished. I go into the month knowing, especially in November, that I will have some evenings when I struggle to function, and can only publish a little bit of fluff.
How the Day Closes In by Beth Weaver-Kreider
my brain is fogged in caught in the mists not even the foghorn not even the lighthouse not even the grim shadows can guide me tonight my ship is enharbored for the foreseeable future
Gratitude List: 1. Cats who want to be next to me 2. Thanksgiving Break is coming up 3. A brisk after-dinner walk 4. Salmon patties 5. The satisfaction of a good stretch May we walk in Beauty!
Yes, I know I wrote a “Spell to Tumble the Tower of Patriarchy” just a couple days ago. So?
by Beth Weaver-Kreider
Heal the girl inside you. Remake the stories, and reel them back and back into time, where the girl, enthralled by Beauty, (not in thrall to power) enters the mouth of the earth, where she chooses her pathway, following the red flower of her own truth, her own permission, her own purpose into the heart of her own realm.
Give her agency. Give her choice. Honor her and listen to her voice. Look into the shadows through her curious eyes. Feel her power rise within you.
This time, when the gods come ravaging, rise with her in the door to the cavern, summon the tribe of fierce mothers of fearsome and raging cave bears, morning sun glinting on your ravening teeth.
Be the raven who guards the boundary between, become the hunter of the predators, take vengeance into your jaws.
Look for the terror to rise in their eyes. Growl. Give chase. Howl. An older magic than theirs lives here. A wilder wisdom feeds this older story.
They may not pass into your secret places. They may not enter your guarded door. Their reign of terror will shatter, shards scattering, raining down upon them.
Gratitude List: 1. Laughter 2. How my succulents are growing even in the dark season 3. The sun through clouds 4. Colored pencils 5. A little full-spectrum light to tide me through the season May we walk in Beauty!
Such a wind. Such a wild, wild wind. Corn husks spiraling down out of the sky, leaves rising in my rearview mirror like something out of a German luxury car ad, that move-along shove from behind as you walk from the house to your car.
A devil-may-care wind, a witches-are-passing wind, a scouring, powerful rowdy wind, the kind that could blow down the towers of injustice, pull kings from their thrones, and lay waste the structures built of lies. No house of cards can stand in the face of that wind.
Gratitude List: 1. The softness of milkweed fluff 2. The view from my parents’ new apartment 3. Rest 4. Smoothie for supper 5. Reminders to seek joy May we walk in Beauty!
Hiking the Chestnut Grove Trails by Beth Weaver-Kreider
It is both disconcerting and charming, the soft grassy pathways disarming the sense of disquiet, the riot of goldenrod, foxtail, and milkweed, native plants seeded along the human-formed hillsides
the wide expanse of grasses, ponds, brambles, and shrubs with scrubby trees and a diverse plantation of oaks. The smoke from farm and industry jar the view, but here too you can see the River, and an eagle gliding,
riding the thermals along the opposite ridge, can see almost as far as the bridge, and down to the dam, more emblems of how humans have transformed the landscape, bearing witness to hundreds of years
of human interference, how it all settles uneasily into these spaces of wildness and cultivation.
Gratitude List: 1. Good brisk walking on the hobbitiest of trails 2. The Susquehanna River 3. So many varieties of oak! 4. Time with a friend who understands my language 5. Cheese on toast May we walk in Beauty!
My friend Mara has challenged her online community to write a sonnet on the 14th day of the month. I will definitely try my hand at something more traditional some month, but today I was feeling experimental, and I read an interesting abecedarian today, so I thought: Half of 26 letters in the alphabet is 13, and if I emphasize the last two letters by giving them their own lines, then I’ll have the 14 lines necessary for a sonnet. Read across? Read down? Read on a downward zigzag? You choose the pathway.
Gratitude List: 1. Weekend–my energy for the work week was definitely flagging 2. A good long walk (on the treadmill, because darkness and cold) 3. One of my colleagues complimented my sweater today by saying I was rocking the 80s vibe, and I feel Seen. 4. Water–nothing like a cold drink of water when you’re tired 5. Experimentation and wordplay May we walk in Beauty!
He’s sure working hard to suppress the evidence of his presumed innocence.
What possible reason could there be, if he is guilt-free, to keep it hidden?
He’s bidden his stooges to silence, riding his sycophants for their loyalty,
expecting to be treated like royalty, trusting his privilege to keep him free
from the consequences of accountability. But the truth is circling ever closer
and he knows although he won’t admit that every century is lit up with the fires
of dictators and strongmen, tyrants and would-be kings spiralling down
to their inevitable ends, their deeds laid bare in the glare of a new-risen sun.
Gratitude List: 1. Re-establishing helpful practices, like making gratitude lists 2. The crescent moon in the sycamore tree 3. Soup 4. Tea 5. Big warm sweaters May we walk in Beauty!
Mockingbird Chronicles 