Tag: acrostic

NPM Day 21: Justice

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings, Poems, Poetry Prompts

Today, write a poem about accountability and consequences. Or make an acrostic poem about JUSTICE. Or try your hand at a credo poem, expressing what kind of society you want to be part of. Perhaps write a letter to the future, explaining what future you have been trying to manifest here and now. You could take a verse—like “Let justice roll down like waters”—and use it as your epigraph, or as a repeated phrase in a chant poem. Find a picture of the blind goddess Justice with her scales, or the tarot card Justice with scales and two-edged sword, and write a poem about justice personified.

Gratitude List:
1. Finally, justice. It’s a hard gratitude, not a soft one, like blossoms and birdsong, because a man is dead, and now yet another black child is dead, and we still have so much work to do, but one step toward a change has been made. Now we work.
2. Collage, quilting, mosaics, found poetry, creating a life: taking pieces and fragments and putting them together to create beauty.
3. Okay, blossoms and birdsong. They’re soft, but they’re also–some days–the crumbs on the pathway that help me find my way.
4. Reflections. Light on the windows. The suggestions of worlds within worlds. Worlds beyond worlds. They way you reflect me, and I reflect you.
5. Smoothies. For some reason, I never really want them in the winter, but spring and summer bring smoothie weather. I look forward to berry season.

May we walk in Beauty!

“Buying a book is not about obtaining a possession. . .but about securing a portal.” —Laura Miller

“I’m writing a first draft and reminding myself that I’m simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.” ―Shannon Hale

“I can promise you that women working together―linked, informed, and educated―can bring peace and prosperity to this forsaken planet.” ―Isabel Allende

“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul alike.” ―John Muir

“When we went to jail, we were setting our faces against the world, against things as they are, the terrible injustice of our capitalist industrial system which lives by war and by preparing for war.” ―Dorothy Day

“What is not acceptable is silence in face of oppression. Boycott if you want, or participate if you want. But do not remain silent in face of injustice.” ―Omid Safi

“When we walk on the earth with reverence, beauty will decide to trust us. The rushed heart and arrogant mind lack the gentleness and patience to enter that embrace.” ―John O’Donohue

“Beauty is an experience, nothing else. It is not a fixed pattern or an arrangement of features. It is something felt, a glow or a communicated sense of fineness. What ails us is our sense of beauty is so bruised and blunted, we miss all the best.” ―D. H. Lawrence

“Poems are maps to the place where you already are.” —Jane Hirshfield

“Be still, and the world is bound to turn herself inside out to entertain you. Everywhere you look, joyful noise is clanging to drown out quiet desperation. The choice is to draw the blinds and shut it all out, or believe.” ―Barbara Kingsolver

“Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.” ―Hermann Hesse

NPM Day 2: Acrostic

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings, Poems, Poetry Prompts
I made this bulletin Board this week. As people write poems on leaves, I will staple them on, and we’ll watch the tree leaf out. I might have to make some apples to add.

(NPM=National Poetry Month)
Write an Acrostic Poem
Choose a word—your name, your favorite word, your password (just kidding!), the name of your town, April—and begin each line of your poem with the letters of the word.

For example:
Please understand:
Once upon a time,
Everything hurt
My feelings.

Write one word per line, or make long and rambling prosy lines. Make it rhyme or eschew rhyme.
Acrostics can be addictive. You probably can’t stop with just one.

This one’s more prosey, perhaps, than poetic, but it’s part of my ongoing chronicle:

Obviously, you can
Live without this one,
Fairly easily. When they
Ask, “Which sense
Could you not bear
To lose?” no one speaks
Of smell. But every day, I
Rest my face in roses, hoping.
Yes, today, the tiniest whiff.

Gratitude List:
1. Succulents. It’s not true that you can’t kill them–I have–but they make such pleasant companions
2. The red leaf-buds on the trees against that blue true dream of sky (eec)
3. My sense of smell is beginning–slowly–to return
4. For all its flaws, The Lord of the Rings. We watched The Fellowship again last night, and it is such a marvelous story to drop into.
5. A long weekend. I’ll say it again: A long weekend!

May we walk in Beauty!

“What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.” —Alain de Botton

“We are capable of suffering with our world, and that is the true meaning of compassion. It enables us to recognize our profound interconnectedness with all beings. Don’t ever apologize for crying for the trees burning in the Amazon or over the waters polluted from mines in the Rockies. Don’t apologize for the sorrow, grief, and rage you feel. It is a measure of your humanity and your maturity. It is a measure of your open heart, and as your heart breaks open there will be room for the world to heal.” —Joanna Macy

“We should have respect for animals because it makes better human beings of us all.” —Jane Goodall

“Let yourself be silently drawn
by the strange pull of what you love.
It will not lead you astray.” —Rumi

“If you hear the dogs, keep going. If you see the torches in the woods, keep going. If there’s shouting after you, keep going. Don’t ever stop. Keep going. If you want a taste of freedom, keep going.” —Harriet Tubman

“The little grassroots people can change this world.” —Wangari Maathai

“Some form of the prayer of quiet is necessary to touch me at the unconscious level, the level where deep and lasting transformation occurs. From my place of prayer, I am able to understand more clearly what is mine to do and have the courage to do it. Unitive consciousness—the awareness that we are all one in Love—lays a solid foundation for social critique and acts of justice.” —Richard Rohr

“You don’t have to attend every argument you’re invited to.” —Anonymous

All the Things I Wish I Had Said

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Poems

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I am using the Curtis Memorial Library Prompt List for a series of morning exercises.  After yesterday’s Abecedarian poem, I began thinking about how I wish I could have given it to some of my students this past semester.  I think the next set of poems I am writing might be:
All the Things I Wish I Had Said (While You Were Still Here)

Courage
An Acrostic Poem

Can you feel how it fills you
once you offer it that space
underneath your ribs?
Remember: You can do this.
After all you have been through,
give yourself this breath, and this one.
Each one will offer you space for another.

Gratitude List:
1. (What gives you strength?) Finding new summer rhythms–more writing, more reading, more yoga.
2. (What opens your heart?) The way that people listen to each other
3. (What refuels you?) Sleep–the summer sleep is returning
4. (What gives you energy?) A clean house
5. (What makes you more completely human?) Stories

May we walk in Beauty!