poem-a-day

Owls

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

Gratitude List:
1. Makin’ little ‘zines–so satisfying
2. Our History teacher is having her tenth-graders make a Hooverville as they study the Great Depression. They’ve actually made a little box town outside where they’ll be having class for the next few days. They have signs with the boxes, and they’ve written paragraphs about them, and now she’s given all the Middle Division teachers a note-sheet with reflection questions so we can take our classes out to experience it, basically turning it into a whole school lesson. So inspiring. Brilliant pedagogy.
3. Roasted cauliflower. Our school has a healthy living committee which challenged us to strive for five a day (veggies and fruits) in the month of March. We are definitely eating more fruits and veg in the WK household.
4. Track and field coaches–I’m grateful for all the time and heart they invest in our kid and his classmates
5. Yellow. I had a fascinating conversation with a friend a few weeks ago about tetrachromatism, the condition where the eyes have more rods or cones or something, causing them to actually see more colors than other people, and how people with tetrachromatism often don’t really like the color yellow. I think I probably don’t have it. Yellow makes me jubilant.
May we walk in Beauty!

“Our task is to take this earth so deeply and wholly into ourselves that it will resurrect within our being.” —Rainer Maria Rilke

“We have no symbolic life, and we are all badly in need of the symbolic life. Only the symbolic life can express the need of the soul – the daily need of the soul, mind you! And because people have no such thing, they can never step out of this mill – this awful, banal, grinding life in which they are “nothing but.” —C. G. Jung

Listen
by Shel Silverstein

Listen to the MUSTN’TS, child,
Listen to the DON’TS
Listen to the SHOULDN’TS,
the IMPOSSIBLES, the WON’TS
Listen to the NEVER HAVES,
Then listen close to me-
Anything can happen, child,
Anything can be.

If you are a dreamer
by Shel Silverstein

If you are a dreamer, come in,
If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar,
A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer…
If you’re a pretender, come sit by my fire
For we have some flax-golden tales to spin.
Come in!
Come in!

“It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch
a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway
into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.”
—Mary Oliver

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” —Once-ler, in Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax

“No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.” ―Nelson Mandela

Twelve Things I Have Learned So Far: (1) You do not always have to be right. (2) People can change. (3) Loss comes to us all, but so does grace. (4) We can disagree and still be together. (5) Kindness is the greatest treasure I have to give away. (6) We are all healed even if it does not happen on our timeline. (7) Imagination is a form of prayer. (8) I own nothing. (9) Life is full of sacred signs if only we look to see them. (10) The ancestors are real. (11) Not all of my friends and mentors are human. (12) Now is eternal and it is my home. —Steven Charleston

Moonshadow

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

Gratitude List:
1. Cosmic Events
2. The community of people all enjoying the same thing
3. Mac ‘n’ Cheese
4. Sheri S. Tepper’s world-building
5. We went owl-watching today!
May we walk in Beauty!

“You have to really hug the [one] you are holding. You have to make him or her very real in your arms.. breathing consciously and hugging with all your body, spirit, and heart. Hugging meditation is a practice of mindfulness. “Breathing in, I know my dear one is in my arms, alive. Breathing out, he or she is so precious to me.” If you breathe deeply like that, holding the person you love, the energy of your care and appreciation will penetrate into [them] and they will be nourished and bloom like a flower.” —Thich Nhat Hanh

“For everything that lives is holy, life delights in life.“ —William Blake

We, unaccustomed to courage, exiled from delight, live coiled in shells of loneliness until love leaves its high holy temple and comes into our sight to liberate us into life.“ —Maya Angelou

“On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.” —Annie Dillard in Teaching a Stone to Talk

“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.” ―Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Where there’s life there’s hope, and need of vittles.” ―JRR Tolkien

“We are the ones we have been waiting for.” ―June Jordan

“Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” ―Albert Einstein

“We are all the leaves of one tree.
We are all the waves of one sea.” ―Thich Nhat Hanh

“It is respectable to have no illusions―and safe―and profitable and dull.” ―Joseph Conrad

“I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.” ―Rainer Maria Rilke

“Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether they are worthy.” —Thomas Merton

Rilke:
God speaks to each of us as [s]he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.

Don’t let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

“What if we reframed “living with uncertainty” to “navigating mystery”? There’s more energy in that phrase. The hum of imaginative voltage. And is our life not a mystery school, a seat of earthy instruction?” —Martin Shaw

The Fib

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Day 6: Write a fib.
There are two ways to write a fib poem. One is to write a lie, tell a tall tale, let loose a whopper of a fiction. Startlingly, the truth can sometimes be found in the margins of a lie.

Or, write in the form of a fib–Fibonacci, that is. In the Fibonacci Sequence, each number in the pattern is derived from the addition of the previous two numbers: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21. So in a Fib poem, the first line is a single syllable, as is the second. The third line has two syllables, the fourth has three, and so on. I usually don’t go higher than 13, and sometimes I write a second stanza and come back down to one again.

Gratitude List:
1. Chris’s Dogboys, Solly and Gabe. Gabe is such a smoochy pooch. Snuggly.
2. Storytelling and songs
3. Anticipating eclipse
4. I’ve said it before, and I will say it again: BLUUUUUUUE sky! (Oy, was that ever a long stretch of grey rainy days.)
5. Quinoa salad with veggies, tahini, roasted rosemary grapes
May we walk in Beauty!

“Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. (Hope) is the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand.” —Rebecca Solnit

“I am not giving up on peace, even if, right now, it is taking some heavy blows. I still believe justice will not desert the innocent. And I will always believe that truth will find its way to the light. These bedrock visions guide me into the future. They hold me up when the going gets rough. Conflict may have the upper hand now, but never count love out. The Spirit has a few surprises to offer in the days to come. Signs of hope will find us wherever we may be. I am not giving up.” —Steven Charleston

“Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.” —Maya Angelou

“God invites everyone to the House of Peace.” —The Holy Quran

“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind.” —George Orwell

“What a pity that so hard on the heels of Christ came the Christians.”
—Annie Dillard

“The arc of history is long, and what we’re here to do is make a mark. . . . You do the work because you’re slowly moving the needle. There are times in history when we feel like we’re going backward, but that’s part of the growth.” —Barack Obama

“Each moment from all sides rushes to us the call to love.” —Rumi

“You are a co-creator of love in this world.” —Richard Rohr

“Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

“When we let ourselves respond to poetry, to music, to pictures, we are clearing out a space where new stories can root; in effect we are clearing a space for new stories about ourselves.”
—Jeanette Winterson

“The greatest thing you’ll ever learn
Is just to love and be loved in return.” —Eden Ahbez

“Remember, the ugly, old woman/witch
is the invention of dominant cultures.
The beauty of crones is legendary:
old women are satin-skinned,
softly wrinkled, silver-haired, and awe-inspiring
in their truth and dignity.” —Susun Weed

Librarians

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 4 Comments

My Saturday has gotten away with me, and my head is not in a poetry place. Sigh. I wish I had done better for the librarians. They deserve more. Every time I started getting into it, I veered into rage at all the ways in which school boards and local commissioners and sanctimonious, self-righteous outrage hounds are attacking libraries and librarians these days. In my local community just a week ago, our public library received a bomb threat, and the library director received a bomb threat at her house.

Support your local library. Stand up and speak out when the hordes attack. Trust librarians.

Keepers of democracy, they stand
on the front lines of free speech,
offering equal access to all who
seek wisdom in the written word.
Do you need a recipe for risotto
or revolution? A book on planets
or inclined planes or things to do
on a rainy day? The librarian will
tell you where to find it, and you
just might find your sense of purpose
in the stacks, in those cathedral
corridors of shelves. You might
discover yourself in a book you
had never thought to open.

Gratitude List:
1. The River, and the sun on the River
2. The sycamores along the River
3. Librarians (Happy National Librarian Day!)
4. Rosemary roasted grapes
5. Those red, red tulips!
May we walk in Beauty!

“Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.” —Terry Pratchett

The Happy Virus
by Hafez
I caught the happy virus last night
When I was out singing beneath the stars.
It is remarkably contagious—
So kiss me.

“It is our mind, and that alone,
that chains us or sets us free.” —Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind.” —George Orwell

“We must live from the center.” —Bahauddin, father of Rumi

“Some days I am more wolf than woman and I am still learning how to stop apologising for my wild.” —Nikita Gill

“Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.” —Albert Einstein

“Writer’s block results from
too much head. Cut off your head.
Pegasus, poetry, was born of Medusa
when her head was cut off.
You have to be reckless when writing.
Be as crazy as your conscience allows.”
—Joseph Campbell

“Ask yourself: Have you been kind today? Make kindness your daily modus operandi and change your world.” —Annie Lennox

“Anyone out there want to sing with me while we finish this march? I realize it may seem a little counter-intuitive right now, with so many in a somber mood, but the harder the walk gets, the more I think we need to meet its challenge with strong hearts and voices. The singing becomes our anthem, a rebuke to the powers of pain and an exaltation of the indomitable human spirit. If we must move forward against all odds, then let us do so singing. Let them hear us coming. Let them know we have only just started to hit our stride.” —Steven Charleston

Guardian

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Gratitude List:
1. All the fine, thoughtful souls at the Poetry Reading and Workshop at Radiance tonight
2. French Fries
3. Cherry trees and peach trees
4. I saw blue sky today, just a patch behind the clouds, but it was there!
5. The Guardians
May we walk in Beauty!

“We write to taste life twice.” —Anais Nin

“My wish for you is that you continue. Continue to be who and how you are, to astonish a mean world with your acts of kindness.” —Maya Angelou

“If you pour a handful of salt into a cup of water, the water becomes undrinkable. But if you pour the salt into a river, people can continue to draw the water to cook, wash, and drink. The river is immense, and it has the capacity to receive, embrace, and transform. When our hearts are small, our understanding and compassion are limited, and we suffer. We can’t accept or tolerate others and their shortcomings, and we demand that they change. But when our hearts expand, these same things don’t make us suffer anymore. We have a lot of understanding and compassion and can embrace others. We accept others as they are, and then they have a chance to transform.” —Thich Nhat Hanh

“I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.” —Martin Luther King, Jr.

“When we plant trees, we plant the seeds of peace and seeds of hope.” —Wangari Maathai

Ask Some Questions

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 3 Comments

Here is my Questions Poem:

Gratitude List:
1. Did you see the sun today? I did!
2. The tang of Horseradish
3. Weaving it all together, integrating the pieces
4. My daily morning Philosophers’ Club, otherwise known as Middle Division Reading and Writing
5. The smell of sandalwood
May we walk in Beauty!

“We cannot be grateful for what we do not notice, and we cannot honor what we fail to see.” —Marcy C. Earle

“I must have flowers, always and always.” —Claude Monet

“Nobody’s on the road
Nobody’s on the beach
There’s something in the air
The summer’s out of reach…” —Don Henley

‘Kindness’ covers all of my political beliefs. No need to spell them out. I believe that if, at the end, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.” —Roger Ebert

In a mist of light
falling with the rain
I walk this ground
of which dead men
and women I have loved
are part, as they
are part of me. In earth,
in blood, in mind,
the dead and living
into each other pass,
as the living pass
in and out of loves
as stepping to a song.
The way I go is
marriage to this place,
grace beyond chance,
love’s braided dance
covering the world.
—Wendell Berry
(The Wheel)

”You have to begin to tell the story of your life as you now want it to be, and discontinue the tales of how it has been or of how it is.” —Esther Hicks

Another Month for Writing Poetry!

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

I’m hoping to create a daily prompt again this month.

Here’s my attempt at a topsy-turvy two-stanza poem. As happens during these months of a poem-a-day, this one’s pretty unfinished and unrevised, but the point is to loosen up and not get caught in my desire for perfection:

You know how it is,
how you amble down that dusty road,
scramble over rocks and stones,
and it becomes a game to name
the turnings on the winding way?
You know, like the story of the children
stumbling through the woods
who laid a trail of breadcrumbs
so they could find their way home.

You could say
it’s all a part of the part you play,
the scene you’ve been assigned,
the way the play’s designed–
one act follows another, but what if
the old woman was saving the brother,
cold as he was from walking in the wood,
and what if the sister got the story twisted,
or the townspeople insisted
on telling the story their way?
Who’s to say?

Gratitude List:
1. A work day at school. It’s nice to have a day when the students aren’t around, just to catch up and catch my breath.
2. A thousand shades of green
3. Flamingos and ostriches. They really do seem sort of impossible, which makes them doubly charming
4. Grounding. Every day, I do a grounding meditation. Since my trip to Tanzania, I can feel my roots spread out so far, so far.
5. The Springtime dawn bird chorus has been filling out a little more each day.
May we walk in Beauty!

Words for the Day of the Holy Fool:
“Let’s be April fools in the Shakespearean sense of fools. Time to be insightful and speak truth to power.” —Jarod Anderson, The Cryptonaturalist

“If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. “ —Emily Dickinson

“The fullness of joy is to behold God in everything.” —Julian of Norwich

“Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.” —Carl Jung

“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, High Tide in Tucson

“When you do not know you need mercy and forgiveness yourself, you invariably become stingy in sharing it with others. So make sure you are always waiting with hands widely cupped under the waterfall of mercy.” —Richard Rohr

“All four gospels insist that when all the other disciples are fleeing, Mary Magdalene does not run. She stands firm. She does not betray or lie about her commitment to Jesus—she witnesses. Hers is clearly a demonstration of either the deepest human love or the highest spiritual understanding of what Jesus was teaching—perhaps both. But why—one wonders–do Holy Week liturgies tell and re-tell the story of Peter’s threefold denial of Jesus, while the steady and unwavering witness of Magdalene is passed over—not even noticed? How would our understanding of the paschal story change if instead of reflecting upon Jesus dying alone and rejected if we were to reinforce the fact that one person stood by him and did not leave? For this story of Mary Magdalene is as firmly stated in scripture as the denial story. How would this change the emotional timbre of the day? How would it affect our feeling of ourselves? How would it reflect upon how we have viewed, and still view, women in the church? About the nature of redemptive love?” —Cynthia Bourgeault, Episcopal Priest

“When I feel this fog rolling in on me, I light fires of affection in the hearts of others. I tell them in tangible ways how the life they live makes me live mine differently, how precious and important they are to the rest of us. That fire then becomes like a beacon which burns through the grey and which I can sail towards.” –Toko-pa Turner

It’s good to leave each day behind,
like flowing water, free of sadness.
Yesterday is gone and its tale told.
Today new seeds are growing.
—Rumi

Dithering on the Doorstep

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Write a Love or Anti-Love Poem, the man says, and so I show up, once again, on the doorstep of the Muse. About halfway through the month, and I’m feeling sleepy and grouchy, and I think I’ve been here before. And I just can’t get up the nerve to ring the doorbell and see what the Muse might have to offer me. Sigh.

it’s always the front door of the muse that gets me,
standing on the porch, anticipating the meeting,
that old dog anxiety nipping at my heels,
and I linger. shall i knock, or shall i ring?

i rehearse my lines, but each one sounds
like it was written by a child, or like i’m rehashing
something i wrote last year when she seemed to like me,
and she had something new for me every day.

here, i’ll tell her, is another prompt! we don’t
have to start from scratch! ugh, but no,
she’ll scoff at me, i just know it. another LOVE poem?
good grief, no wonder you dither on my doorstep.

i’m not dithering on the— okay, maybe just a little,
but what if she sends me away with nothing?
what if that poem i wrote last june the last good thing
i’ll ever write? what if she has nothing more to give?

Gratitude List:
1. Origami
2. A clean kitchen
3. Sweatshirts (I don’t think I bought a single sweatshirt in my 30s and 40s, but last year I bought a sweatshirt from my school, and now I have three, and I love them)
4. Next week is a holiday week, and the college kid comes home
5. Autumn gingkos
May we walk in Beauty! Beauty all around.

“We live in a world of theophanies. Holiness comes wrapped in the ordinary. There are burning bushes all around you. Every tree is full of angels. Hidden beauty is waiting in every crumb. Life wants to lead you from crumbs to angels, but this can only happen if you are willing to unwrap the ordinary by staying with it long enough to harvest its treasure.”
—Macrina Wiederkehr

“It was one of those days you sometimes get latish in the autumn when the sun beams, the birds toot, and there is a bracing tang in the air that sends the blood beetling briskly through the veins.” —P.G. Wodehouse

“You deserve a lover who takes away the lies and brings you hope, coffee, and poetry.” —Frida Kahlo

“I touch God in my song
as the hill touches the far-away sea
with its waterfall.
The butterfly counts not months but moments,
and has time enough.”
—Rabindranath Tagore

Clarissa Pinkola Estes:
“We are needed, that is all we can know. And though we meet resistance, we will meet great souls who will hail us, love us and guide us and we will know them when they appear. Didn’t you say you were a believer? Didn’t you say you pledged to listen to a voice greater? Didn’t you ask for grace? Don’t you remember that to be in grace means to submit to the voice greater?

“One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times. The light of the soul throws sparks, can send up flares, builds beacons, causes proper matters to catch fire. To display the lantern of of soul in shadowy times like these—to be fierce and to show mercy toward others; both are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity.”

“Speak to your children as if they are the wisest, kindest, most beautiful and magical humans on earth, for what they believe is what they will become.” —Brooke Hampton

“Apprehend God in all things, for God is in all things.
Every single creature is full of God and is a book about God.
Every creature is a word of God.
If I spent enough time with the tiniest creature—even a caterpillar—
I would never have to prepare a sermon.
So full of God is every creature.”
—Meister Eckhart

Yes

It could happen any time, tornado,
earthquake, Armageddon. It could happen.
Or sunshine, love, salvation.

It could you know. That’s why we wake
and look out–no guarantees
in this life.

But some bonuses, like morning,
like right now, like noon,
like evening.
—William Stafford

“The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.” ―J.R.R. Tolkien

Lost Luck

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today’s prompt is to write a luck poem. I’m having fun playing with internal rhyme and watching how it drives the line forward, how it pushes into the meaning of the following line. It’s almost like putting a puzzle together, and almost like following a large willful dog on a leash.

Where do you go to find your lost luck?
Look where it settles in ditches,
and hitches itself into trees,
where it sees through the mists
into the distance and takes the long view.

Watch how it grew when you thought
you had bought the last morsel of hope,
how the rope which had bound you
dissolved from around you, and you
suddenly found yourself once again free.

Would you be here if not for the seeking,
the desperate pleading when all seemed so lost,
when all hope was tossed into the whirlwind,
the promises hindered, the heart’s desire stuck,
and then here you are, free to seek for fresh luck.

Gratitude List:
1. Student delightfully self-congratulating a Duolingo success: “Yes, Grrrl! You got it!”
2. This morning’s autumn mist on the fields between Marietta and Mt. Joy.
3. I never know what is going to draw a whole class into discussion. I try every angle I can, and sometimes, everyone is suddenly jumping in, on fire with ideas. Today was one of those days in our upper division discussion about My Antonia. They had had enough background already in social studies classes regarding “Manifest Destiny” (idea and painting) that even my quietest introvert pushed himself up out of his chair and came up to the front of the room to point out his ideas about the painting. (YESSSSS!)
4. Analyzing characterization through the lens of the D and D alignment chart
5. Playing with words
May we walk in Beauty!

“Choosing to be honest is the first step in the process of love. There is no practitioner of love who deceives. Once the choice has been made to be honest, then the next step on love’s path is communication.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Some believe it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. It is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love. Why Bilbo Baggins? Perhaps because I am afraid, and he gives me courage.” ―Gandalf

“When I stopped trying to change you, you changed me.” ―Rachel Macy Stafford

“When will the change begin? When will it start to happen? We have waited so long and prayed so long, when will the light begin to shine in this conflicted world? Our answer is: when we each begin to see it in ourselves. When we believe and not despair, when we love and not fear, when we give and not take – then we will see the change start to happen, and happen all around us. The answer is already here, within, waiting for us to find it.” —Steven Charleston

“When Teresa of Avila was asked what she did in prayer, she replied, ‘I just allow myself to be loved.'” —Anthony de Mello

“I never lose. I either win or I learn.” —Nelson Mandela

“If you have never been called an incorrigible, defiant, impossible woman… have faith. There is yet time.” —Clarissa Pinkola Estes

The Things She Said

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today’s prompt at the Writer’s Digest poetry blog is to write an odd poem. I was feeling uninspired, so I decided to just started typing and let myself mostly free-associate. It ended up not really being as odd as I thought it might be, and it kind of hangs together surprisingly well. I think I sort of made up a story. . .

the last thing
she said before she left
was something about
how memory evades interpretation
how the ends don’t always
justify the meanings
how the sparkle in your eyes
seemed to have dimmed over time
because of the way the Old Ones
never wanted to reveal themselves

the first thing she said
when she returned was
that she had never known anyone
who reminded her so much
of her long-lost lover as you
on the day when you stood
in the dark garden and swore
allegiance to the moon

the way she looked at you
the way she her eyes drifted off
to the side of the frame when you
took that portrait someone hung
in the gallery on the corner
of Seventh and Lime

the way you could never seem
to say her name without
the briefest pause beforehand
as though you were forgetting
or reluctant to commit the act
of resurrecting her memory

Gratitude List:
1. We saw one of the white squirrels in Palmyra today! It was in a yard with two crows. It looked like they were having a meeting
2. Chocolate cake. I am working so hard to keep my sugar under control, but I am also not living a life of complete self-deprivation, and that was good cake
3. I think I am mostly over the achiness of the Covid/flu vaccine double whammy
4. Just hanging out here with the kid and the cats
5. Pumpkin soup and sauteed cauliflower
May we walk in Beauty!

“It is fabled that we slowly lose the gift of speech with animals, that birds no longer visit our windowsills to converse. As our eyes grow accustomed to sight they armour themselves against wonder.” —Leonard Cohen

Denise Levertov:
Don’t say, don’t say there is no water
to solace the dryness at our hearts.

I have seen
The fountain springing out of the rock wall
and you drinking there. And I too
before your eyes
found footholds and climbed
to drink the cool water.

The woman of that place, shading her eyes,
frowned as she watched–but not because
she grudged the water,
only because she was waiting
to see we drank our fill and were
refreshed.

Don’t say, don’t say there is no water.
The fountain is there among its scalloped
grey and green stones,
it is still there and always there
with its quiet song and strange power
to spring in us,
up and out through the rock.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
—Leonard Cohen

“Remember that day in the woods
when everything was so dark, so dreary
and you were so terrifyingly alone?

How can it be that these are the same woods
and you the same soul
and everything shines so,
and everything is filled with life?” —Beth Weaver-Kreider

“Acquiring problems is a fundamental human need. It’s as crucial to your well-being as getting food, air, water, sleep, and love. You define yourself–indeed, you make yourself–through the riddles you attract and solve. The most creative people on the planet are those who frame the biggest, hardest questions and then gather the resources necessary to find the answers.” —Rob Brezsny

“We are free-falling into the future on a bed of broken symbols.” —attributed to Joseph Campbell

“We aren’t disturbing the peace. We’re disturbing the war.” —protest sign

Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav: “The whole world is a very narrow bridge, but the most important part is not to be afraid.”