pigeon

Pigeon and Dawn

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

pigeon
Shirati, Tanzania: a long-ago dawn with African green pigeon. (1969?)

From a photo of a distant place of my childhood to a poem of my River, just down the ridge from where I am typing in the newborn morning. I wrote this one of April of 2014:

Susquehanna Dawning
by Elizabeth Weaver-Kreider

Stand just there on the sandy bank of the river.
There, where the water laps over the roots
of the ancient sycamore. There, where the bridge
and the memory of a bridge run over the water.

Listen for the rustle and murmur of dawning,
the whisper of wavelets, the groan of the trees,
the sudden wild call of robin: thrush of the morning,
leading the dawn chorus, unwrapping the day.

What will you discover this daybreak, this borning?
What stories will otter bring you? And heron?
What are the words that the river will utter,
there, where the sun spreads the golden road before you?

Gratitude List:
1. Phoebe, sitting out in the misty, dripping trees, calling his name into the dawn.
2. The mist, the rainy season
3. The trees: sycamore, poplar, oak, walnut, dogwood, maple, willow
4. Those two crows, winging purposefully across the hollow
5. All the ways in which we hold each other, carry each other, listen for the sound of each other’s tears and laughter, even from great distances.

May we walk in Beauty!

Aconite and Crocus

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Slides 097
A Shirati morning, circa 1970.  Todd is holding
an African Green Pigeon. 

Gratitude List:

1. That fog last night, how it swirled around the lamps on the bridge, how it turned the lamplight into a living, swirling thing.
2. Yellow aconite.  Violet crocus.  The boys say they have seen the bees.
3. Friends of Shirati banquet last night.  Old friends.  Lifelong connections.
4. Daryl Snider’s concert at the banquet, how every song seemed to be perfectly designed for the moment.  Here is one of the songs he sang last night, “Nou se Wozo,” about resilience.  This performance was from last fall when Sopa Sol (the singing duo of Daryl Snider and Frances Crowhill Miller) sang it with LMH’s Campus Chorale.
5. Dawn chorus

Ducks in the Rain and a Dove with the Fire of the Sunset in Its Eyes

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

It happened to me again this morning.  I woke up with the fragments of dream-world swirling through my brain, but as text, not as image.
“I place it into my bowl full of winter.”

And then there was more, several more surreal, semi-attached bits of cobweb-phrases.  But those I don’t remember.

Something about the key to my grandmother’s house.

I woke up and tried to write it as a poem.  All I could do was to write and re-write the phrase.  Again and again.  So this will be my next poetry prompt.  I’ll try again tomorrow.  Join me, if you like, or pull an image or phrase from your own dreaming to join to mine.  We’ll see what we come up with, eh?

In the meantime, here’s a photo of my goofy son and a blue egg.  And a gratitude list.

2013 April 055

Gratitude List:
1.  Funny Blue Cat: Winky sat on one of Ellis’s pastel drawings last night and now she is blue, providing lots of laughs today.
2.  White ducks in the rain on the green grass.  I’m not trying to channel WCW, but I love this pair of white farm ducks that seem to love sitting on the lawn of the Rutter’s right next to the road.  They could be under the forsythia bushes.  And I love the look of them in the rain.
3.  The lovely people who send me images.  My heart is so warmed and encouraged by the photos, the wonder, the story my cousin Don told me about seeing a white dove with the fire of the sunset in its eyes.
4.  Community-building.  Changing the system together.  I went to see the movie Fresh tonight.  Family First Health, a local medical practice offered the screening free at York Little Theater.  They’re pushing for real health, those folks, eating real food.  I love Joel Salatin and his “Chicken-ness of the chicken, pig-ness of the pig, tomato-ness of the tomato.”  He gets the deep archetypal import of it all.  And Don Ikerd.  I love Don Ikerd–he says we can change, we can wean ourselves from industrial ag and back to real actual food again.  Now, if only the small farmers can make a living in the meantime. . .
5.  Being who I want to be.  I feel like the chrysalis may soon be ready to crack open.

May we walk in beauty.  So much, so much love.