poem

After All

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

Today’s prompt on Poetic Asides is to write a Poem titled, “After ______.”

After All
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

After all is said and done,
when you’ve won the battle,
when you catch your breath
and stretch your fingers to the sun,

will you still believe in all the words
and songs that led you to your path?
Will you remember all the guides
who walked beside you in the lonesome days?

Will you praise the small coincidences
of the wayside trees that brought you comfort,
and the sort of incidental shining stones
that made a trail for you to follow?

After the dust has settled,
after the room has stopped spinning,
after the dice have rolled the magic number,
will you stumble onward blindly

in the noonday glare, or will you pause
and rest a moment, give a knowing glance
toward the river and the willows, the pebbles
and the flaming trees of spring?

Will you sing a grateful poem to the day?
Will you kneel? Will you build an altar?
Will you dance? Will you pray?

Gratitude List:
1. Phoebe calling
2. Bluebird muttering
3. Fixing things
4. Water
5. Poeming

May we walk in Beauty!

I Stole This Poem

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment
I drew this back at the end of February, when I finally began to feel that awful weight of winter shifting just the lightest bit.

Today’s prompt on Poetic Asides is to write a stolen poem. Here’s my attempt:

Poetry Prompt: Write a Stolen Poem

I stole this poem years ago, actually,
from a shelf in a corner of that old book shop
on a quiet street down by the river.
Dust motes twinkled in shafts of sun
which slanted through the windows.

I eased the leather-clad book from a high shelf.
I thought I heard it whispering.
My fingers tingled with its electric pull.

I knew it would contain treasures:
words like glisten and linger,
like numinous, mellow, meringue.
I thought it might glow on the page,
hum my name, offer me words to ponder:
tendril, exquisite, winsome, wander.
And words strong and feral,
like flame, wild, and bramble,
courageous, incarnate, sycamore.

I thought it might tell me how not to be afraid,
how to not put so much stake in other people’s opinions,
how not to trust the lure of the the easiest road.

It did not disappoint.
I’ve kept it, concealed,
waiting for the moment,
the right invitation,
to reveal it.

Scenarios

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Brewer’s prompt for the second day of National Poetry Month is a two-fer: Write a best case/worst case scenario poem. I can’t get Dickens out of my head on this one. I want to do a best of times/worst of times sort of thing. It’s only the second day, and I have left my poem until it’s almost too late to think.

Scenarios

There could be snow. There could be sun.
We could all live to a ripe old age,
or be mowed down by disease or accident
in our youth, or our prime, or our golden years.

There could be an extra cup of coffee tomorrow,
or no time for the necessary drug of the second cup.
We could change our ways and turn it all around,
or keep racing pell mell toward certain destruction.

We could save each other from our worst impulses
or we could drive each other into bad decisions.
We could choose at least the process of our fate
instead of letting it rule us and wreck us.


Whom Shall We Trust?

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

During the season of Lent, the worship materials for the Mennonite Church suggest a more ritualized confession time, not particularly about confessing sin, but expanding it to confess what we believe. As part of the ritual, a few people each week are asked to come forward and bring their confessions in the form of a poem or a piece of art or a story or a reflection of some sort. Today, I have been asked to be part of the ritual, answering the question: “Who will trust in God today?” Here’s my poem:

Whom shall we trust?
When hurricanes and charlatans
destroy the weak?
When the meek are set
to inherit a world laid waste by greed?
When human need bats last,
long after lust for money, sex, and power?
Whom shall we trust
in this hour when so much has been lost?
When the cost seems too high
for such a simple thing
as resting in belief
that the Holy One has time
for grief about our trials and tribulations.

The pillars of the past no longer hold.
They’ve had feet of clay all along,
and wrong upon wrong upon wrong
has brought the ancient houses down.
There’s no more room here for illusion.

How, then, shall we trust?
Shall we just ignore the lancing fear
that tears our sense of safety from its moorings?
That bears us outward into territories
we’ve not known before?

Perhaps it’s not a matter
of ignoring what we face,
but rather an attempt
to place our anxious thoughts
within the context of the Greater Power.

I will put my trust in Mystery,
in that ineffable presence we call God,
in the Knowable Unknowing,
and in the One
who put on shoes like us
and trod the roads we walk,
and spoke as one who knew
the course of human suffering.
I’ll trust us to the Holy Wind of Spirit,
who hears our songs and knows our fears,
who causes us to rise, though we resist;
in our resistance fills our sails,
the wind that pulls against the kite
and makes us rise to higher height.

Perhaps nothing can be truly known,
no comfortable future gardens
sown with seeds of certainty.
But we can trust the certainty of seed,
the trusty breeze of Spirit
and the rains of the Creator
on these fields we bear within us.

Gratitude List:
1. The Little Sisters buzzing for pollen among the crocus and anemones
2. A fun afternoon of pond play yesterday with my kid
3. This man who makes the most amazing birthday cakes
4. The opportunities for my soon-to-be-teenager to learn to do the tech things he loves
5. Summer break is on its way

May we walk in Beauty!

A Brilliant Brigid’s Day

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

Song for Brigid’s Day
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

Do you feel how the world comes alive?
How even underneath its coat of snow,
inside the bright crystals of the ice,
something in the Earth is stirring?

Within your own eyes I see it rising–
in this breath,
and now this one–
the Dreamer is awakening.

The dawn has come,
spreading its golden road before you,
asking, “Will you step upon the pathway?”

As you move out onto the road,
Brigid’s sun upon your face
will trace your outline full behind you,
defining you in the Shadow
which will be your soul’s companion
into spring.

–2018

Brigid’s Day has dawned bright and sparkling. The groundhog and her rodent kin have seen their shadows. The crone can merrily wander through the woods edge and hedgerows to gather firewood for the next six weeks of winter.

And here’s one of the sacred truths of the moment: If I’m willing to look deeply into the reality of my own shadows, if I’m willing to know them, to understand how they reflect me and show my inner realities, then I have nothing to fear from the shadows. I have nothing to fear from the coming weeks of winter.

Yesterday after I got home, I went out to shovel the drive so it would be easier for Jon to get up the slope. My neighbor came out to help me. She loves to shovel snow, she said. She loves winter, especially when it’s cold and snowy. And for those moments with her, shoveling and talking together, I too loved the cold and the snow. For the beauty, for the exercise, but mostly for the neighborliness.

Questions to Contemplate in the Season of Brigid
This is the season of sunlight and shadow:
What is the shape of my shadow?
How does it hamper me?
How does it hold me?
How does it tell me the shape of my soul?

Brigid is the Smith, she who works the forges:
What within me is being tempered this season?
What is being shaped and shifted?
What sacred patterns are being traced along my edges?
What useful tool am I being forged to become?

Brigid is the Healer.
The waters of her well bring wholeness.
What spaces within me need the touch of her waters?
What dis-ease drains my vitality?
How can I offer the waters of healing to others?

Brigid is Patroness of Poets.
How do words shape my reality, like iron is shaped in the forge?
How do my words bring healing, like water from the well?
How can I speak poetry into the cold and the shadows
of the season which is upon us?
Can I offer my daily words with the care and the artfulness of the poet?

Rooting

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment


Today’s prompt was to write an action poem. I chose rooting as my action. I am really weary, and this feels like half a poem, and raw at that, but I need to get to bed.

Rooting

Take root.
Root around.
Spread your roots
deep underground.

Breathe into your roots.
Put your feet in the earth.

Root into the deep soil of a poem,
seeking the truffles and treasures
that lie in hidden caverns of sound
and rhythm and image.

Root through the fertile ground
of a conversation to find the seeds
a new ideas, the gemstones of an open mind.

Send your taproot down,
further down,
where the soil nourishes
your burgeoning green.

You Are My Favorite

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment


Today’s prompt is to write a favorite poem:

You are my favorite color:
that golden shine of sun on the trees in the morning,
that deep cotton grey of dusk,
that rich mocha brown of turned earth,
that silvery sheen on blue waters.

You are my favorite sound:
the sigh of a breeze through the sycamore,
the quiet hum of a child at play,
the full-throated song of a joyful choir,
the chorus of birdfolk at dawn.

You are my favorite feeling:
this tingle of warm sun in spring chill,
this shiver of the spine at a memory,
this sigh of soft satin on the inside of the wrist,
this ease of rest at the end of an aching day.

You, Too, Will Rise Again

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment


Today is the first day of National Poetry Month 2018! As I often do, I will follow Robert Lee Brewer’s poetry prompts on his blog Poetic Asides (associated with Writer’s Digest) for writing a poem a day during the month. Today’s prompt is to write a “secret” poem.

Lately I’ve been finding great satisfaction in publishing my tiny poems on Instagram, in a short and terse format. It requires a different set of poetic muscles to write in extremely short forms. There’s something that feels more intimate in this process, and I find my short poems taking on a Sufi-esque tenderness. I find myself wanting to emulate Rumi and Hafiz. So today, I just tried to make it happen. I would like to shift it so there isn’t a direct gendered pronoun in the last line, but I didn’t want to lose the intimacy.

Gratitude List:
1. Yesterday’s celebration of a beautiful, vibrant, compassionate, wise, intellectual, and grateful woman. Grieving together as a gathered community. Stories of the Mama Bear, the Turtle Dove, the Wise Owl.
2. Those goldfinches at my father’s feeders are wearing their spring motley, and the gold is shining through.
3. Getting out and walking with the family. Every winter, I start to feel like it will never get better, like the rest of my life will be spent indoors. Then there comes a day when things open up, I can crawl out from under the rock of the season, and I can suddenly breathe again.
4. Redbuds are blooming! Have you seen them? Oh, my heart suddenly felt free again when I saw them.
5. Transformation. I know we spend our time in the tomb before we can be resurrected, but I just always lose sight of the coming transformation.

May we walk in Beauty!

Speak Your Story

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

This is the poem I presented at the education conference I attended this weekend. I came away from the conference inspired and energized. The answer, behind all the pedagogical strategies and theories and techniques, is always Love.

And the Third Circle is the Heart
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

“The eye is the first circle, the horizon which it forms is the second: and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.”
–Ralph Waldo Emerson

The heart, too, is a circle,
the horizon expanding to infinity
or contracting into a small black hole.

The round bud of the heart
opens, the radius expanding.

The work, you say, is to keep opening,
casting that radius wider
at every turn of the wheel,
to hold everything within its protective arc,
the bright flowers and the white-hot stones.

When I begin to say
that I am you and you are I
then the pain that you wear
must wound me too.

This is the work,
to widen that horizon that lies within
to hold the world, if we must.

This is the burden
we choose
to carry:

To be watchers,
weight-bearers,
to inwardly transmute
these stones we are given to bear
into gems of great value.

To keep soft,
to let the ego
slip down
into a weightless place.

Speak your story.
Let it fall like a stone
into the quiet pool of my heart.
The circles expand out and outward,
not matter but pure energy,
more doors opening.

I see you.
I feel you.
I know you.
I recognize myself in you.

These are the doors we step into.
These are the circles we enter.

Namaste.

Gratitude List:
1. Collegiality
2. Stepping out of my comfort zone
3. Wise mentors
4. Listening
5. Being heard

May we walk in Beauty!

Going Somewhere

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today’s prompt is to write a Going Somewhere poem:

This poem gets up before dawn.
It listens for the rustle of a thousand starlings
waking in the hollow, and follows them out into the grey.
This poem feels the splattering of rain on its face
and the tingle of autumn chill on the skin.
It keeps its face tilted into sky
as the leaves twirl and flutter
out of the morning sky.

This poem has somewhere to go.
It’s going where the geese go,
following those ragged lines
sprinkled across the sky.

When you wake at midnight,
you will hear it calling through the darkness,
urging you to adventure,
tempting you to take your risks
and pack your dreams into a bag
to follow where it leads.

“Poets are kind of like—it’s a bad metaphor, but—canaries in a coal mine. They have a sense for things that are in the air. Partly because that’s what they do—they think about things that are going on—but partly because they take their own personal experience and see how that fits in with what they see in the world. A lot of people might think that poetry is very abstract, or that it has to do with having your head in the clouds, but poets, actually, walk on the earth. They’re grounded, feet-first, pointing forward. They’re moving around and paying attention at every moment.” —Don Share
*
“This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.” —Maya Angelou
*
“We need poets to change the world.” —Justin Trudeau
*
“…Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.”
—from “How to Be a Poet (to remind myself)” by Wendell Berry
*
Morning Prayer
by Phillip Newell
In the silence of the morning
your Spirit hovers over the brink of the day
and a new light pieces the darkness of the night.
In the silence of the morning
life begins to stir around me
and I listen for the day’s utterances.
In earth, sea and sky
and in the landscape of my own soul
I listen for utterances of your love, O God.
I listen for utterances of your love.

Gratitude List:
1. The weekend, right on time
2. Language that builds bridges, that invites conversation, that includes spaces for listening
3. Autumn skies
4. How good it feels to be warm after I have been chilled
5. This wall of photos of our ancestors

May we walk in Beauty!