November Haiku Triptych
by Beth Weaver-Kreider
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!
Today’s prompt is to write either a big or a little poem. We’ve spent the evening (after voting) at the cross country banquet, and I am tired, so a small poem will have to suffice. I have been going back and forth about whether that last line should read “leaving” or “going.” I decided on the more pathos-filled version.
autumn dark descends
a plane drones beneath the stars
someone’s leaving home
Gratitude List:
1. These coaches and all the time they give to our children
2. When I brought home a half peck of apples yesterday, someone in the family did a happy apple dance
3. Got home and sat on the couch to write my poem, and immediately had a cat pressed against each hip
4. I love when my books weave together. I am just about to finish My Antonia with a class, and I’m listening to The Personal Librarian. Although they’re in slightly different time periods, Willa Cather lived at the time when Belle da Costa Greene was JP Morgan’s private librarian.
5. People who work for justice
May we walk in Beauty!
“The stories I’m trying to write, and which I want to promote, are stories that contribute to the stability of my own culture, stories that elevate, that keep things from flying apart.” —Barry Lopez
“What the world wants, and people need, are people who believe in Something—Something that will lead them to the good, the beautiful, the true, and the universal.” —Richard Rohr
“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word “love” here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace – not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” —James Baldwin
“I am not talking about giving our hearts over to despair. I wonder if we can train our hearts, intentionally, like athletes who train for a marathon, to bear the load without crumpling under the weight. I think that’s what the children need from us, for us to bear them, bear the stories, hold them as though they were our own, to be prepared to act at any moment for any one of them within our reach. I think the times call for hearts strong enough to be tender, to bleed without weakening, to rage and protect and pray and hope without numbing out.
“I don’t think it has to be a choice. We don’t have to choose between the closed heart and the broken heart. We can be awake and yet not despair. It’s worth a try.” —Beth Weaver-Kreider
“If we are going to see real development in the world, then our best investment is in women.” —Desmond Tutu
“Activism is the rent I pay for living on this planet.” —Alice Walker
“When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive—to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.” —Marcus Aurelius
Found on a T-shirt: “I am totally happy and not dangerous mostly.”
“Part of the tragedy of our present culture is that all our attention is on the outer, the physical world. And yes, outer nature needs our attention; we need to act before it is too late, before we ravage and pollute the whole ecosystem. We need to save the seeds of life’s diversity. But there is an inner mystery to a human being, and this too needs to be rescued from our present wasteland; we need to keep alive the stories that nourish our souls. If we lose these seeds we will have lost a connection to life’s deeper meaning—then we will be left with an inner desolation as real as the outer.” —Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Adrienne Rich: “When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility of more truth around her.”
“I have been in Sorrow’s kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows, with a harp and sword in my hands.” —Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road
I’ve started ignoring the prompts and just doing my own thing. It’s nice to know the prompts are there when I need them to give myself a jump start. I spent the day doing school work and then went to a play this evening. I decided to work on a haiku on the ride home.
Gratitude List:
1. Sitting under a pear tree on a golden spring morning, sun sparkling through the thousand new leaves
2. As I walked down the road in the morning, a young red-shouldered hawk called my name, then leapt from the branch and circled in blue sky above me three times before wheeling out over the valley and up the far ridge
3. Gifted young actors and singers and dancers–the show miraculously went on during a power outage in a lobby lit by emergency lights
4. Breakthroughs–breaking out of mental blocks
5. Always there are new things to learn
May we walk in Beauty!
Earth Day Words:
“The world is, in truth, a holy place.” —Teilhard de Chardin
“Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.” —Henry David Thoreau
“You are your own cartographer now.” —Ralph Blum
“If we surrendered
to earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.”
―Rainer Maria Rilke
“Every creature is a word of God.” ―Meister Eckhart
“The forest for me is a temple, a cathedral of tree canopies and dancing light.” ―Dr. Jane Goodall
“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better, it’s not.” ―The Onceler (Dr. Seuss)
“The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.” ―Rachel Carson
William Stafford: “I place my feet with care in such a world.”
“A society is defined not only by what it creates, but by what it refuses to destroy.” ―John Sawhill
Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature — the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.” ―Rachel Carson
“A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full or wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantment of later year…the alienation from the sources of our strength.” ―Rachel Carson
“Few words are so revealing of Western sexual prejudice as the word Goddess, in contrast to the word God. Modern connotations differ vastly from those of the ancients, to whom the Goddess was a full-fledged cosmic parent figure who created the universe and its laws, ruler of Nature, Fate, Time, Eternity, Truth, Wisdom, Justice, Love, Birth, Death, Etc.” ―Barbara G. Walker
“Our vitality is inextricably bound up with creativity. Like a tree whose expression is fruit, giving our gifts is what keeps life pushing through our veins. It’s what keeps us feeling alive. As anyone who has strayed too far from their creativity knows, without it every corner of one’s life can fall prey to a terrible greying spread. As Kahlil Gibran writes about trees in an orchard, “They give that they may live, for to withhold is to perish.” —by Toko-pa Turner
“Come under the wing of the Spirit. All of you beneath a threatening sky, working in fields far from home, turn and come now, come under the wing of the Spirit. The protection of the sacred will shelter you. The strength of the holy will surround you. When the time comes, trust your own instincts, and come under the wing of the Spirit. There you can ride out the next storm. There you can renew your energy for the next call to prayer. These are the days for which we were made. This is the moment for miracles. When you hear a distant bell, come under the wing of the Spirit.” —Steven Charleston
That goldfinch out there.
Really—he’s like a little nugget of sunfire.
How can he shine so?
He must be lit from within.
—Moonbat
““What can a tree teach us about self-worth? How it grows only so big as its mothersoil can provide for, how it draws nutrients from her, but then expresses itself in leaves and fruits. How it kindly emits oxygen and purifies the air. How it offers itself as shelter, how it shades, how it sometimes lives to be ancient or not, but always offers its body back to the soil which grew it. How it becomes a nurse log upon which a whole new ecosystem can grow. Reciprocity is the only practice which can heal the alienation we feel from The Family of Things.” —Toko-pa Turner
“You are your own cartographer now.” —Ralph Blum
April first had a sort-of-haiku poem in it, but today is actually National Haiku Day, so we have to write haiku today. The American form of the ancient Japanese tradition is a three-stanza syllable-count poem with lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables. At its most basic, that’s it, but there are further rules to follow, if you want to take on that challenge:
Make the theme about nature
Focus on a very specific, clear image, and then add a second very crisp image
Use sensory words
One of the words in the poem gives a sense of the season of the year
The third line offers a surprise or twist or shift (often that second image)
Here’s my attempt for the morning:
Spring sun warms feathers.
Tiny sparrow hops, sees me.
The cat is also watching.
Gratitude List:
1. How sun shines on the green
2. How squirrels suddenly stop, and stand with their hands over their hearts, wide-eyed
3. How invigorating a morning shower feels
4. How everything is in bud, is in flower. Me, too. You, too.
5. How wise words enter the labyrinth of the heart.
May we walk in Beauty!
Sunday’s Messages:
“The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them.” ―Thomas Merton
“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.” ―Thomas Merton
“We see quite clearly that what happens
to the nonhuman happens to the human.
What happens to the outer world
happens to the inner world.
If the outer world is diminished in its grandeur
then the emotional, imaginative,
intellectual, and spiritual life of the human
is diminished or extinguished.
Without the soaring birds, the great forests,
the sounds and coloration of the insects,
the free-flowing streams, the flowering fields,
the sight of the clouds by day
and the stars at night, we become impoverished
in all that makes us human.”
―Thomas Berry
“All acts of kindness are lights in the war for justice.” ―Joy Harjo
“We have only begun to know
the power that is in us if we would join
our solitudes in the communion of struggle.” ―Denise Levertov
“There are two types of people. Avoid them.” —Mary Engelbreit
Today’s poem prompts were “train” and “message.” I was wandering through the long grasses of the long A sound in train, and ended up at the Amazingville Station. One day, years ago, when the poetry was so heady and giddy I could hardly keep from floating away, someone wrote on someone else’s poem, “You are sleeping with everyone in Amazingville,” and Mara wrote a poem beginning with that phrase. I have wanted so terribly to travel again to Amazingville, so I figured out today that perhaps you need to take the train.
Someone in one of my groups said he likes this poem, but he doesn’t really understand it, which it exactly how I feel, too. I responded with this, and maybe it makes a little more sense to me now: “I’m not sure I understand it, actually. My seven and seven is the final two lines that turn the haiku to tanka, so the haiku is perhaps a summoning spell, a way to bring me back to Amazingville, too, and I will finish the incantation with my two lines of sevens.”
Here’s the weirdness, and then a video of last year’s Easter Magdalene poem:
Taking the Train to Amazingville
by Beth Weaver-Kreider
When you get off the train at Amazingville Station,
send me a message that you have arrived.
Make it a five seven five, American haiku,
and let the cutting word be one that sets me free.
Then bring me around with the sweet music,
the alluring scent of your season word.
Call me home with haiku and I’ll come to you
on the next train, with my seven and seven.
Gratitude List:
1. That within us which is wild and untameable. The Wildness that calls to be experienced and known. This is why one of my names for the Holy One is the Wildest One.
2. Autumn walks. Leaves falling all around. Red berries. The scuttlings of small animals and birds in the brush.
3. Circles of protection and care.
4. Haiku and Tanka and terse, short-form poetry.
5. A good night’s sleep.
May we walk in Wildness!
It’s a packing tape dispenser, but it is also a bear.
On some of these days
the only poem I can
muster is haiku
Lame, I know, but it’s what I’ve got today.
Gratitude List:
1. Sleep: I love that moment when I lie down and I can feel the tiredness receding, can feel my body relaxing, can let my mind follow its own trails
2. The ones who don’t give up
3. Moments of solitude and quiet in the midst of a busy time
4. Timeless stories–we’re getting into The Odyssey in Freshman English, and they’re hooked by the stories
5. Changing it up
May we walk in Beauty!
(This is me at the age of six, in someone’s banana plantation.)
Cold rain has fallen.
Clouds part, sun floods the hollow.
And where have you gone?
Gratitude List:
1. All the reminders yesterday to keep open to surprises.
2. Nieces and nephews. Cousins to my children.
3. All the green. Somehow green means more this spring than usual.
4. Making things. Creating. Seeing something inside my head, and then putting it into the physical world. Isn’t that an amazing process?
5. Rain and sun.
May we walk in Beauty!
I am snuggling a boy and a cat in my lap at the moment: benefits of a cool morning. Makes typing a challenge, though.
Here are a couple poems that walked into my head yesterday. The first is a tanka, inspired by my friend Mara. I thought the second was going to be a tanka, too, but while I was waiting for the last two lines to emerge, I realized it was already a haiku.
TANKA
See there! In your palm
are the rivers of story,
of constellations,
dragonfly wings, the pathways
of the heart: love, grief, desire.
HAIKU
The now-naked arms
of the walnut tree cradle
the newly-born moon.
Gratitude List:
1. Autumn birdsong in the hollow
2. Listening
3. Constructing my own life
4. Breakfast
5. Tiny Poems
May we walk in Beauty.
Mockingbird Chronicles 