found poem

Funny, Isn’t It?

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Sometimes it takes a lot of reworking and re-arranging, and cutting up phrases to fit to other phrases. This one was almost too easy. I like how it fell together, so I am not going to tug and pull at it for a few more days. I think it’s done. Great Gratitude to all the Facebook Friends who submitted phrases!

Funny, Isn’t It?
a Facebook Crowd-sourced Poem
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

We had been in camp for three months.
In the very middle of the front row,
his bony hands clasped in front of him:
“That’s why everyone hates each other nowadays—
I guess poor guys dont get kissed on the lips.”
My stomach drops at the muffled sound of glass breaking.
Since when do men care about such things?
This is a dangerous time for you.

We have to confront each of our shadow aspects.
I was in the habit of considering that etheric
little bone defying the course of the waters,
but the crucial bit of magic was to keep your focus
on every angle of a question.
I had decided to build and not destroy,
start with the strongest sensation.
I didn’t expect it to look so wild.

Learn from those far away and long ago.
In many spiritual traditions, sin does not exist.
A nation where you can’t ask questions
is one that is going downhill.
Atonement is unnecessary, since dreams
bring guidance from the well of Being.
Firebrands ask questions,
and I would say she is everything.
Her job took on a new shimmering significance.
Funny, isn’t it? How it all comes around.

Sources:
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Dream Count.
Alexie, Sherman. The Absolutely True Diary of A Part-time Indian.
Barbery. Muriel. The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Callahan, Patti. Once Upon a Wardrobe.
Genet, Katherine . The Gathering.
Haig, Matt. The Life Impossible.
Haig, Matt. The Midnight Library.
Harpman, Jaqueline . I Who Have Never Known Men.
Helminski, Camille Hamilton Adams. The Way of Mary.
King, Karen L. The Gospel of Mary of Magdala.
Kinney, Wallis. A Dark and Secret Magic.
Klein, Gerda Weissman. All but My Life.
Lee, Min Jin. Pachinko.
Menakem, Resmaa. My Grandmother’s Hands.
Myss, Caroline. Sacred Contracts.
Patchett, Ann. Tom Lake.
Quinn, Kate. The Briar Club
Reichel, Hanna. For Such a Time As This: An Emergency Devotional
Rowling, JK. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
Shaw, Martin. Scatterlings.
Winspear, Jacqueline. The Comfort of Ghosts.

Gratitude List:
1. Playing with words
2. Being on Break!
3. How hard the guitarists and singer worked this morning to prepare for their performance at Grandfriends’ Day
4. Getting things done (this is a recurring gratitude for me–I think it’s about my tendency to procrastinate, so it feels especially soul-cleansing to have a list of things I have accomplished.)
5. Anticipating time with Beloveds
May we walk in Beauty!

Found Tanka

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

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!

At the Gallows

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

I was back at school today after a day off for this bad cold. My head still feels like it’s full of rocks. So the poem today was slightly lower effort. In a little break today, I went through the first few chapters of The Scarlet Letter and pulled out words and phrases that seemed to go together in order to create a found poem.

I think I’m going to have to come back to this again and see what possibilities arise. I’m actually more pleased with these results than I expected to be.

At the Gallows
a poem found in The Scarlet Letter
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

I.
a throng of bearded men
heavily timbered
founders of a new Utopia
on one side of the portal
kept alive in history
under the footsteps
of our narrative

II.
on a certain summer morning
in that early severity
that witch was to die upon the gallows

on the summer morning the women
appeared to take a peculiar interest
they were her countrywomen

III.
make way, good people, make way
open a passage
iniquity is dragged out into the sunshine
the spectacle of guilt and shame
woman, transgress not
beyond the limits of heaven’s mercy
on this wild outskirt of earth
art thou not afraid

IV.
her sin the roots
which she had struck into the soil
the chain that bound her here
could never be broken
her shame that all nature knew

V.
a torch kindles a name
destiny had drawn a circle about her
witchcraft gathered about her
the sound of a witch’s anathemas
in some unknown tongue

VI.
the fallen woman had been
on her pedestal of shame
possessing the lock and key
of her silence

“May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears.”
—Nelson Mandela
*****
For a day, just for one day,
Talk about that which disturbs no one
And bring some peace into your beautiful eyes.
—Hafiz
*****
“Whatever you’re meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.” —Doris Lessing
*****
“Open your mouth only if what you are going to say is more beautiful than silence.” —proverb
*****
“All religions, all this singing, one song. The differences are just illusion and vanity. The sun’s light looks a little different on this wall than it does on that wall, and a lot different on this other one, but it’s still one light.” —Rumi
*****
The magic of autumn has seized the countryside;
now that the sun isn’t ripening anything
it shines for the sake of the golden age;
for the sake of Eden;
to please the moon for all I know.
—Elizabeth Coatsworth
*****
“. . .fairies’ gold, they say, is like love or knowledge—or a good story. It’s most valuable when it’s shared.” —Heather Forest, The Woman Who Flummoxed the Fairies
*****
“Sacred is another word for energy. Some physical spaces are sacred because they vibrate with the energy of the Spirit. Some rituals are sacred because they connect infinite energy with finite creation. Some memories are sacred because they transmit the energy of those who are now our ancestors.  Some visions are sacred because they are the energy of hope, transforming our lives, right before our eyes.” —Steven Charleston

Tools for the Resistance

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

This was Fun! And a lot of hard work! A few days ago, I asked friends on Facebook to offer their tools for the resistance as we work to meet the challenges of the coming days. I was unprepared for the magnitude of the response. I received 119 comments on the thread. Some comments included several ideas which I unwove into different lines. Others echoed each other, and I wove those together as I could. I decided to let the actual phrasings stand as written in as many cases as possible, though I often only pulled out shorter phrases from longer sentences to make the points succinct. I printed out four pages of about 110 lines of poem, sliced the lines apart, and arranged them in a flow that felt good to me. Here is the finished poem, with great gratitude to my beloved community:

Tools for the Resistance:
A Crowd-Sourced Poem
by Beth Weaver-Kreider and friends

Strengthen yourselves for what is to come.
Set your boundaries, clearly and effectively.
Strengthen your resolve.
Practice resilience.
Stay visible.
Wear black.
Harness that bone-deep disappointment to determination.
Mourn. Invite people to mourn with you.
Scream. Invite people to scream with you.
Use the tool of your voice. Use reason.
Pay attention. Prepare yourself for when you will be needed.
Resist tyranny.
Don’t hide. Don’t obey in advance.
Teach the history of non-resistance and civil disobedience.
Do civil disobedience. Push back.
Refuse to follow unethical instructions.
Carry forward our history of resistance.
Mobilize the angelic warriors.
Get your cell phone camera ready.
Get your boots on the ground.
Put on your pink hat. March!
Find joy in action!

Gather facts and information, knowledge and experience.
Read. Research and read.
Think critically.
Practice intelligence.
Practice bravery.
Educate.
Make sure people know how the system works.
Teach the privileged to be allies.
Unlearn the whitewashing of history.
Disempower ignorance.
Tell the truth. Share it boldly and without rancor.
Confront your elitism and privilege.
Stop recycling old arguments.
Examine your assumptions.
Be humble.
Be an active ally: Say, “What can I do?”
Come alongside. Check in. Hold space.
Greet the ones others look away from.
Actively love the disenfranchised.
Actively listen to them, and follow the marginalized ones.
Follow the directions of the young ones.
Walk with your elders.
Connect. Coresist.

Boycott. Buy local. Buy independent.
Vote with your money. Know where your dollars are going.
Volunteer.
Gather folks who care.
Create adaptable support systems.
Teach basic skills.
Teach people to make things for themselves.
Grow the movement. Draw people in.
Share ideas and plan actions.
Look to your sisters.
Learn the value of true friendship.
Hold on to each other.
Give care to those in your sphere.
Practice breathing together
Share your gentleness.

Aid in the collective healing work.
Midwife one another.
Extend gifts of listening. Listen selflessly.
Listen to and hear each other’s stories.
Tell stories of hope and resistance
Have hard conversations.
Make eye contact.

Make music. Send sound soaring to the heavens.
Make music without words.
Memorize music and poetry.
Sing songs about equity, freedom, and democracy.
Sing songs of peace with children.
Teach music to children.
Use humor: Humor has always been a tool of resistance.
Have fun! Be creative!
Make art, make art, make art.
Dance!

Walk with friends.
Walk in the woods. Sit by streams. Gaze at the stars.
Find stillness in nature. Soak in the beauty.
Save seeds. Share seeds and plants. Plant seeds. Find new seeds.
Plant community gardens.
Use herbs and words together to incant and pray and sing.
Find wisdom from the flowers.
Take inspiration from strong sturdy trees.
Grow your community of trees.
Remember the roots that connect us all.
Keep your eye on beauty instead of disorder.
Keep your eye on peace, standing shoulder to shoulder.
Practice courageous kindness.
Hold onto hope.

Practice resistance as a spiritual act.
Practice gratitude.
Practice radical self-care.
Practice slowness, enchantment, being, and noticing.
Upgrade consciousness.
Meditate. Be fully present in the moment that is.
Practice reflection.
Recharge.
Use magic. Cast spells.
Hold sacred circles.
Create the Yes.
Pray: “Love, make me an instrument of your peace.”
Continue to show up for mercy and peace and justice
Continue to show up for kindness and compassion
Continue to show up for wisdom and safety
Remember: You are not alone.
Let your little light shine. Shine it into the shadows.
Be a beacon of light and hope.

Gratitude List:
1. Co-poeming
2. Taking a group of students to a nursing home today to interview their elders. Beautiful interactions. I am incredibly proud of these young people.
3. Self-care. I had been neglecting my careful lunch creation in the past week (a bit depressed, I think), and so spent some good time this evening cooking a pot of grains, sauteing kale and carrots, and roasting soybeans for the rest of the week.
4. How the little pothos cuttings grow roots, and then push out new leaves.
5. Good stories.
May we walk in Beauty!

BROKEN TRUTH

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

Today’s prompt was to write a thoughtless or/and a thoughtful poem. I decided that a found poem is the perfect example of both. I am taking up the lines that friends on FB offered me, entirely without putting thought into them. Then the arranging requires much thought. Probably more than I have after a long day at school. But here it is:

Childhood traumatic experiences
have been shown to bear very directly
on what authorizes
or rationalizes the fear.

Since appliances vary in power,
the back seat,
unlike the sturdy external shell of my snail,
is the safest place for children.

My supporting structure was internal.
The sport of adult political orientations
was a defining passion
whole clocks later,

Whatever the truth is,
it was eventually broken.

Cuckoos crept into other birds’ nests,
laid their eggs among strangers,
We shouldn’t put it off any longer,
try to minimize the interruption
of bass fishing by scheduling
going to the dragonfly pool.
Water flowed from the ground
in hundreds of springs and seeps
to one huge bottle
that could have contained nothing
but a captured djinn.
It will be anchored to one spot.
I have to dig.
When you identify it,
ask next what I was
and what I wasn’t.
All characters in this book
have no existence.

Discover that the heart is
moved everywhere by a pulse
that is aliveness in gut.

These instructions are guidelines only.
You will know them by their fruits.
In the end there was love,
untried muscles,
glow on your lap,
trial by earth.

You needed the normal routine:
thorn, nettle, bramble, gorse, and briar
sealed in stone and hidden by fire.
I sing, I sing to the end.

Gratitude List:
1. Warm blankets
2. Rest
3. Kind words
4. Doing the work
5. Rest
May we walk in Beauty!
(I didn’t realize at first that I had typed “Rest” twice. I am going to let it stand.)

“Love the earth and sun and animals,
Despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks,
Stand up for the stupid and crazy,
Devote your income and labor to others…
And your very flesh shall be a great poem.”
—Walt Whitman

“I believe the world is incomprehensibly beautiful—an endless prospect of magic and wonder.” —Ansel Adams

“A tree is a nobler object than a prince in his coronation-robes.” —Alexander Pope

“We must finally stop appealing to theology to justify our reserved silence about what the state is doing—for that is nothing but fear. ‘Open your mouth for the one who is voiceless’—for who in the church today still remembers that that is the least of the Bible’s demands in times such as these?” —Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“Christianity stands or falls with its revolutionary protest against violence, arbitrariness, and pride of power, and with its plea for the weak. Christians are doing too little to make these points clear. . . . Christendom adjusts itself far too easily to the worship of power. Christians should give more offense, shock the world far more, than they are doing now.” —Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“Those who love their dream of a Christian community more than they love the Christian community itself become destroyers of that Christian community even though their personal intentions may be ever so honest, earnest, and sacrificial.” —Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.” —Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.” —Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“It is so easy to break down and destroy. The heroes are those who make peace and build.” —Nelson Mandela

“We are not lacking in the dynamic forces needed to create the future. We live immersed in a sea of energy beyond all comprehension. But this energy, in an ultimate sense, is ours not by domination but by invocation.” —Thomas Berry

NPM Day 28: Write a Cento

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today is National Great Poetry Reading Day! No, I’m serious! It’s a thing.
Go get you some Angelou, Dickinson or Whitman,
some Baraka, some Stein, some Oliver, and read it out loud.
Read to yourself, to your lover, to your students,
to your sister, to your cat. Read to the wind,
to the apple tree, to the dishwasher, to the dust bunnies.

Dive into those great poems and make yourself a cento, which means “patchwork garment” in Latin, which makes this poem form seem extra special. Really, it’s a glorified found poem. You pull lines from a bunch of different poems and you make a poem from them, sticking them together in ways that seem to connect and complete each other’s thoughts and ideas. Homer did it. So did Virgil. So you can, too. Put an asterisk at the bottom of your page and list the poets you borrowed from.

Gratitude List:
1. May apples
2. Maples
3. Moooon
4. Massage
5. Meditation

May we walk in Beauty!

“The great affair, the love affair with life, is to live as variously as possible, to groom one’s curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred, climb aboard, and gallop over the thick, sun-struck hills every day. Where there is no risk, the emotional terrain is flat and unyielding, and, despite all its dimensions, valleys, pinnacles, and detours, life will seem to have none of its magnificent geography, only a length. It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.” —Diane Ackerman

“I take literally the statement in the Gospel of John that God loves the world. I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love. I believe that divine love, incarnate and indwelling in the world, summons the world always toward wholeness, which ultimately is reconciliation and atonement with God.” ―Wendell Berry

“A crone is a woman who has found her voice. She knows that silence is consent. This is a quality that makes older women feared. It is not the innocent voice of a child who says, “the emperor has no clothes,” but the fierce truthfulness of the crone that is the voice of reality. Both the innocent child and the crone are seeing through the illusions, denials, or “spin” to the truth. But the crone knows about the deception and its consequences, and it angers her. Her fierceness springs from the heart, gives her courage, makes her a force to be reckoned with.” —Jean Shinoda Bolen

“Go as far as you can see; when you get there you’ll be able to see farther.” —Thomas Carlyle

“At the end of the day, I’d rather be excluded for who I include than included for who I exclude.” —Eston Williams

“Free me. . .from words, that I may discover the signified, the word unspoken in the darkness.” —Byzantine Prayer

“Father, Mother, God,
Thank you for your presence
during the hard and mean days.
For then we have you to lean upon.
For those who have no voice,
we ask you to speak.
For those who feel unworthy,
we ask you to pour your love out
in waterfalls of tenderness.
For those who live in pain,
we ask you to bathe them
in the river of your healing.
Dear Creator, You, the borderless
sea of substance, we ask you to give to all the
world that which we need most—Peace.”
—Maya Angelou

“This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.”
—Leonard Bernstein

Stillness. One of the doors
into the temple.”
—Mary Oliver

“If you just learn a single trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view… Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.” —Harper Lee

NPM Day Ten: Find a Poem

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 3 Comments

Today, Find a Poem.
Finding a poem is kind of like making a quilt, where you take small pieces of fabric and stitch them together to become something beautiful and wholly your own. When you find a poem, you do the same thing with words, taking words and short phrases that catch your fancy like bright pieces of cloth, and then you decide how to stitch them together.

Here are a couple ways to find a poem:
1. Tear out a page from an old magazine or book (yes, really–I keep several on hand just for this purpose). Scan the page for words you like, words that might go well together, either making a certain sense, or simply sounding interesting together. Circle them. Cross out the others. Decorate the page. You can also do this with junk mail, or papers that you are throwing away. (If you’re a student, try one of those essays or term papers.) You can tape the page into your journals, take a photo of the finished process, or type it out.
2. As you listen to conversations today, or scroll through your social media, write down words and short phrases that you see or hear on little pieces of paper. Sit down with a stack of these, and shuffle them around on a flat surface until they resolve themselves into a poem. Tape the pieces together or type it up.

Poetic forms always have their rules, and I am a firm believer in the intellectual process of trying to create something that fits those rules–I think it refines the poet’s capacity for sensing inherent rhythms and sounds. But I also strongly advocate for breaking and revising the rules when they don’t suit you–that’s one of the ways new forms are born. There is one rule in Found Poetry that I recommend following pretty closely: Don’t take too many words in a row. The final poem should be yours. If you simply must take that entire sentence or complete phrase, then make sure to credit your source in your final poem.

Gratitude List:
1. Such fine care from my Beloveds. Hand-me-down clothes, stones to hold, scents to smell, advice for healing, images to meditate upon, reminders to rest. I love you, I love you, I love you.
2. Weekend!
3. The goldfinches are goldening
4. Trees in bud everywhere
5. Poeming saves me. When the world gets either frantic or flat, poeming grounds and centers.

May we walk in Beauty!

“Stay close to anything that makes you glad you are alive.” —Hafiz

“The problem is that you think you are separate from others.” —Richard Rohr

“You have to want a thing enough to reach out for it.” —Lailah Gifty Akita

“To wait within the moment for the coming dawn,
To breathe the single breath of all that lives,
To walk the web on which we all belong,
To face the newborn day with love instead of fear.
To listen for the whisper of the Spirit’s wind,
To feel Creator’s heartbeat in the world around,
To hear the grace of the Beloved in my neighbor’s voice,
To embrace the sacred space between the past and change.”
—Beth Weaver-Kreider

“Hope is a dimension of the soul. . .an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart. It transcends the world that is immediately experienced and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. . . .It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.” —Vaclav Havel

“When time comes for us to again rejoin the infinite stream of water flowing to and from the great timeless ocean, our little droplet of soulful water will once again flow with the endless stream.” —William E. Marks

“We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.” —Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“Healing is not pouring your energy into another, but activating the widening field of possibility around yourself, so the other may glimpse their own majesty forming on the horizon.” —Toko-pa Turner

Finding Poetry, Part 1

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

I needed a mental health break. I wasn’t feeling the burn of an emerging poem, but I needed the fix of a poetic experience without having to go deeply into the trance state of poetic midwifing. So I posted a request: I asked my friends to open a nearby book to a random page, put a finger at a random spot, and type in a short sentence or phrase near to where their fingers landed. I took all their lines and crafted a poem. It was playful, whimsical, and deeply satisfying.

Here is the result of the first one I did (yeah, I have done more):

The Impermanence of This Floating World
(A Facebook Crowd-Sourced Found Poem)
by Beth Weaver-Kreider and Friends

Pray for us, O Mary.
Show us the face of your Son.
Then she spoke to me.
“There’s nothing to figure out.
I am who I am.
The way I see it,
all children are our children.
Mature souls are more comfortable being vulnerable—
all feeling is born in the heart.”

I looked up and saw the beauty,
looking upward into its mighty boughs.
Still, we know who’s swaying:
outside there is quiet in the dark.

Sleep is, I know now, impossible when skylarks are in song. . .
Did we fly swiftly toward the stars until our wings tired?
While the vault of heaven rings,
it appeareth about Easter, when Alleluia is sung again,
a drawing together of any kind:
that isn’t sacred?

Jean asked Maxwell not to utter
another word until he heard her side of the story.
So long a journey confirms that work,
his blue figure struggling. . .
Imagine how easy it is for me.
Monitor the type of risks you’re taking,
for this is the Lia Fáil, the stone of destiny—
must need both hands to pick them up.

Pentacles are work, money, and security,
a degree of understanding.
Looking back, she did not regret the making love,
a welcome relief from the daily drudgery of life,
having effected this disguise so completely.

The dermatologist was, in his own eyes, an artist beyond reproach
(g to return to. Excerp t the futhe r he goes, t he smaller t he hallway).
Knowing Hollywood, they probably would
have whitewashed it anyway.
Moral theories are wanted to explain
what makes an action right or a person good
Guilt is another common reaction,
particularly among parents.

The children of your servants shall continue
the duet, flush with possibilities
that produces a continuous pitch;
the most important and familiar among them
is the common Buttercup of the meadows.

Remove the air joints, then the grease line
from the left bearing cap:
fourteen hours of driving ahead.
Nourish faith—
there are many ways to reach the goal.
What we have to eat and drink together,
we usually mean traveling, waves,
ice-cold waves arched up into walls.
The impermanence of this floating world
I feel over and over.
Is sorrow the true wild ?

Again, you’ll have to trust your senses
and be very focused as you use this technique.
The visions are so terribly distinct
that I almost imagine them to be real.
“Most people don’t burn to death,” I said.

Gratitude and a Rule for Parenting

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Gratitude List:
1. Glorious Lady Magnolia tree on 462 across from the Red Rose. Oh goodness! Can a tree be traumatized from witnessing humans kill each other?
2. I changed the cutting head on the string trimmer all by myself. It took a lot of figuring to get the old one off, but I managed.
3. Open House at my school tonight. Nice to spend time with colleagues, and to get a chance to show off the school to prospective families. It was lovely to see a few students again, too.
4. Baked oatmeal for supper. Comfort food.
5. How doing art makes you see the world differently.

May we walk in Beauty!

A Rule for Parenting:
Never simply say, “Don’t lick your brother’s food.”
You have to also say,
“Don’t tell your brother you licked his food, even if you didn’t. Especially if you didn’t.”
“Don’t lick the packaging that your brother’s food is in.”
“Just don’t lick or talk about licking your brother’s food.”
I probably should have included more permutations, but I was getting just a little cranky (momspeak for VERY GROUCHY). This parenting gig can be hard.

Here’s a found poem. I put it together from strips of paper and glued it to yesterday’s painting. I was loving it, and so I put Mod Podge on it to seal it, but instead it stayed white and gloopy. It was a disaster. I pulled off the pieced and mostly salvaged the painting, but the poem strips were destroyed.

One morning before dawn
in the thick of that month,
the trees still heartrendingly asparkle,
the women’s laughter,
as dark as bitter chocolate,
lodged in the house of
beautiful magnificent wings.

They halted at the woods,

Passage through the wilderness
was not a simple matter
to escape a forest without shade,
We have to ascribe to femaleness
the audacious, the math, the order.

Below, the alligators
are sleeping in the grass
awaiting the rain.

When I look up, you look up,
and we know.

Laundress

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

DSCN9103 DSCN9102 DSCN9101
It has been a couple years since I have had the time and energy to maintain a Poet-Tree in the yard, so I made one on my bulletin board.

Today’s poem is a threading together of fragments of Facebook posts from years gone by on this day.  A Facebook Found Fragment poem.

Doozy of a storm.
The poetry is shredded.
I will be such a laundress today
and fix up my tree.
I have a fierce attachment to hope.

Sleep is such a magical elixir. And elderberry.

The trees are taking that last inbreath
before they explode into bloom.
My heart is breaking. And healing. And breaking.

Soak up the energy,
give yourself a break from perfectionism,
sample a bit and see what it tastes like,
become a drop of sunlight
and whisper in on the breeze.

See? There you have it:
Sometimes I feel so awkward
about who to be, how to be.
But that means there is always something to learn,
always a new path to explore.

Gratitude List:
1. Anniversaries.  Our wedding anniversary may be in September, but today is a special anniversary.  Here is how I said it three years ago: “This day, [29] years ago. Pizza, pool, and a penny for good luck. I decided that it was time to tell that cute shy boy how much I liked him. Turns out, he liked me too. He’s still cute, and sort of shy, and I like him a whole, whole lot.”
2. New car!  When you try to run your vehicles just to the point before they become more expensive to maintain than it would be to buy a new one, then the purchase of a new car is a really big deal.  Roxanne Rustbucket has served us well for many years–she’s the only car our children know.  Hopefully, Pippi (yes, as in Longstocking–we were thinking of VillavillaCoola) Prius will haul us safely through another decade.
3. Having a day of lesson plans that just follow simply from yesterday’s lesson plans and don’t need a huge amount of planning.
4. Mary Oliver
5. All the shining eyes of the day–thoughtful, hopeful, tricksy, needing, giving, knowing, compassionate, connecting. . .

So much love!  May we walk in Beauty.