poem

True Names

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

2013 April 004

I gave my students in Creative Writing an assignment to create a collage and then write a short story or poem or essay that was sparked by the images that came together.  The idea was to begin the semester by unhitching the horse of the brain from the writing process for a moment–letting the creative urge impel them–and also to get them working with images right away.

I haven’t taken a photo of my collage yet, but here is the poem I wrote in response to them (I always seem to make two collages at a time).  A friend of mine recently turned me on to Francisco X. Alarcon’s poetry (he died a couple days ago), and I am finding the simplicity of his work to be incredibly powerful.  I cannot quite get myself to simplify enough to really be Alarconesque, but it was a powerful poetic experience to work in his style.  Also, we have been working with models of professional writers as a way to spark creativity, and we were working with an Ursula Le Guin short story about True Names, and that also found its way into my poem:

fire and flight

after the fire
has kindled
within you
patient gestation
of coals beneath
your heart
between
your ribs

fire within you
fire in the earth
fire in the fruit
the egg
the seed

flames will burst forth
and you will rise

you will know
your wings
you will
open your feathers
catch the breezes

the old world
of magic and monsters
will fall away
below you

you will dance
on pillows of cloud
you will swim
in rivers of air

you will hear your
true name
in the voice
of the wind

Gratitude List:
1. The promise of snow.  (I know, it causes anxiety, too, not knowing what will happen, but I look forward to being cocooned in the house for a time.)
2. Making collage.  Perhaps it was an entirely personal agenda to give that assignment, but I had fun making my own collages.
3. Lights at ends of tunnels.
4. Taking root.  Taking flight.
5. True Names.  One of your True Names is Beloved.

May we walk in Beauty!

Let Me Learn

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

DSCN8834

May I learn to walk today
the way that butterfly walks
down sunbeams and breezes
in a purposeful meander
from shimmer to glory to shine:
desire to desire

to speak in the manner of fox
who listens all day from her home
in a hole beneath bramble
quiet and quivering,
and speaks only in the dark
a fierce and joyful bark
that tingles the spine
and calls out the wildness

to dream the dreams
of the ones who will become,
there in the round stones
of shell, patient, breathing,
until the moment is ripe
for breaking open the houses
that have held them protected.

Gratitude List:
1. Hearing the fox scream from the bosque in the midnight.  Terrifying and thrilling.
2. The Underground Railroad history of Columbia.  We went to see a train layout at the Columbia Historical Preservation Society yesterday and got into conversation with a man who is an expert on Columbia’s role in helping people escape from slavery.
3. These halcyon days of Winter Break that are almost at an end.  It has been time out of time.  Many mornings for snuggling.  Lots of play and chatter.  (In the interests of balanced reporting, it must probably be noted that there has been yelling and grouching and sulking as well).
4. Dream-messages
5. Moving on to new chapters.

May we walk in Beauty!

Wait for the Story

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

2011 June 227

Today’s prompt is to write a ritual poem.  This is one of my favorite words.  I love internal preparations for sacred and holy moments.  Here is one pathway inward:

It’s a room that you enter, a space you create.
Settle your roots: down, down and deeper,
raising your branches out into starlight.

Breath first, the winds and the breezes,
scent of the morning, shelter of dawn,
many voices calling, whispering, singing.

Feel your fire rising,
energy lifting your spirit like flame.
Burn.  Let desire be the fuel.

The river flows through you, around you, within you:
quiet meandering, raging through rapids.
Gaze deep into pools for the answers you seek.

Stand firmly on earth.  Let it hold you and shape you.
Enter the cave which leads to your center.
Rock is your reason.  Soil is your mentor.

Enter the labyrinth, spiral to center.
You come to the crossroads, the meeting of pathways:
Rest in the shadows.  The story will find you.

 

Gratitude List:
1. Play
2. Work
3. Song
4. Art
5. Well-being

May we walk in Beauty!

Stones for Memory

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Carin

Today’s prompt is to write a poem about memory.

I have always envied others their power of memory.  My own is so fickle, so capricious, unreliable.  My ability to concentrate and memorize poetry or lines for a play in the present moment are, I think, above average.  I’m nowhere close to having a photographic memory, but I feel like I understand the brains of people who do.  This has served me well in the short-term.  I can quickly learn a story, hold a lesson plan, memorize a poem, prepare for a play.  But my powers of remembering in the long-term are, I think, way below the average.  I can remember very few of the teachers in my growing up years.  Even college, even grad school, even my first years of teaching–all are receding, dragged backward out of my memory.  This has always been kind of painful for me.

What I tell myself is that I live in the present so completely, that the butterfly of my personality sits so completely in the now, that I do not take my mind back enough to pull out the pieces of past and examine them, and so they flow out and away.  Perhaps this is not exactly a defect in my personality, but it remains a deep and abiding pain.  I lose the past too utterly, and I do often feel it as a personal deficiency: if only I would get my flightly brain to concentrate more often on what has gone before, perhaps I could keep it, hold on to it.  Still, I cannot make myself hold memory.  My brain is wired for this moment.

I place in the hands of Time these stones:
the story of this day,
the people I have been near to,
the songs the Fates have whispered in my ears,
the colors that haunt me.

See how they turn to mist,
how they glow for a moment–
red, then golden, then blue–
then dissipate like ash blown by a wind
before I can register
that they have lost their substance.

Where does memory go
when it flows out with the tide,
when it slips down the drain,
when it is blown out with the morning fog?

I am still the child in the forest,
walking blind through the swirling mists,
under the shadows of the great trees.
With each forward step on the trail,
a little bird flutters from the pathway behind,
a bread crumb in its beak.

Gratitude List:
1. Memory
2. Longing
3. This moment
4. The shades of dawn
5. Small moments in which to breathe.

May we walk in Beauty!

Medicine and Mockingbird

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Gratitude List:

1. Using gratitude lists as a prompt in school today.  Why haven’t I done this before?  It felt like a gift I gave myself–such bright and deep and thoughtful responses.  I am going to miss these people.
2. That poem that a student handed me today to fulfill a class project.  May you thrive.  May you live deeply.
3. How the Earth provides the medicine.  The tulip tree is blooming, which is beautiful, but suddenly the allergies are going haywire.  So, more plantain and wild chamomile and catnip and mint and nettle and lemon balm tea with honey.  I will try one more night without the allopathic remedy.
4. New haircut!  I always feel like a work of art when I have been to see Kristen.
5. Mockingbird, as I was walking out to gather herbs this evening, sang to me in Ovenbird, “Teacher-teacher-teacher!”

May we walk in Beauty!

Seasoning

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Tonight’s prompt is to write a poem about a season:

I am not going to write a poem tonight.
This dog of the seasons, who waits
between winter and spring
to spring out from nowhere,
teeth bared and fur on end.

So I won’t be writing a poem tonight.
Instead I”ll write a recipe:
30 mL of Dayquil
2 zinc tablets
two droppers of Elderberry tincture
and sleep.

 

Gratitude List:
1. Adrenaline.  Got me through tonight, and will get me through tomorrow.
2. Sleep–most powerful elixir.  Nine times out of ten, it works for me.
3. Those poets and storytellers!  I love performing among them.  I love the deliberate and careful spoken word.
4. Forsythia is just starting to bloom!  Another thing to keep me liking my neighbor–so much yellow comes to him in daffodils and forsythia, it must be a message to me to be kind in my thoughts.
5. Josiah’s book.  While it can be draining because he is always begging us to write sentences in it, i love how excited he has been about making his own book.  And he keeps adding and adding and adding to it.
6. The people who are keeping vigil at Chiefs’ Hill today and tonight and tomorrow to grieve the bulldozers on sacred Native American burial grounds.
7. I just lost this entire post, but the computer had automatically saved the draft.  Yay for Autosave!

May we walk in Beauty!

There Needs to Be a Poem

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

There needs to be a poem here
something to fill the space
to inspire
to bless.

There needs to be a word
that fills the small green hollows
between the first shy greeting
and the questions
that draw out the hearts
like small burrowing animals
from their safe nests.

There needs to be a song here.
At least a whispered line
with a hint of a melody
and a rhythm
like the chirping of the tree frogs
high in the oak grove.

Let us stand in the moment
shoulder to shoulder
like the deer on the verge
we caught in our headlights,
and listen for the distant unrolling of words.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  That wonderful woman at OfficeMax yesterday who said that since the Lancaster store was selling notebooks for a penny a piece, she could give me the same price, and then only gulped a little when I said, “That’s so great!  I’d like a hundred for my English classes!”  I quickly realized that I was taking overenthusiastic advantage of a kindness and cut my number back just a little.
2.  Waters of Transformation.  Yes, indeed.
3.  I have a job where people sometimes start the day with a collegial hymn-sing.  Have I landed in a perfect place for me, or what?
4.  Inspiration struck when I needed it and before I was a complete wreck of exhaustion: I have been a little anxious this weekend about preparation for the coming week.  I came away from last week sort of feeling like I had drained my wells of inspiration for lesson plans.  Just like poetry writing, however: When you let go, sometimes the streams begin to trickle back in again, and sometimes they come in as a flood. I hope the students are a tenth as eager for the work I present tomorrow as I am to present it.
5.  Family time.  Meeting Kim’s dear children.  Basking in Craig’s delightful smile.  Listening to the harmonica trio play in harmony.  Discussing recipes for fish.

May we walk in Beauty!

Big Heart, Big Grief

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Alas, but the wee mousekin has died.  A small boy is learning that terrible and beautiful lesson that we all must learn throughout our lives, again and again and again: that when you open your heart to great love, you open your heart to great grief.  But oh, his heart broke so.  And so did ours, as we tried to be present, to help him be present, to witness that small death.  And of course, he is fine, and chattering on about the hamster that a wee mouse made space for in our idea for our life.

Amid all the sadness of that loss, and the excitement of making a new small friend, I hope he will never forget that day of tender care for one of the tiniest creatures.  I hope he will always remember how, when he would put his long slender fingers into the bin where it lived, the big eyes would turn eagerly toward him, and wee Shiver would scurry eagerly onto his hand and burrow her tiny face into his palm.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  For the big-hearted boy, for the chance–no matter how painful–to learn of grief early and gently, to name the feeling and mark it in his heart.  For his readiness to open his heart again.
2.  For the man who sat with the boy and wept with him silently, not asking him to process or discuss–only to witness and experience his emotions.
3.  For being recognized in the lists of poets from the Poem-A-Day challenge last April.  It’s not like winning a contest, really, but just having some of my poems noticed amidst the many that were posted feels kind of good inside.  I feel like I’ve joined a community of poets.
4.  Change.  Just enough.  Not too much.  Not too little.  In that place between too quiet a routine and too unbalanced a life.
5.  Camp.  I know I put this one up here just a few days ago, but that was gratitude for how well camp went for my boys.  Today I put it on the list for how it gives me a little breathing space in the clamor of summer demands.  Quiet.

May we walk in Beauty!

Pebbles

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Wear today loosely,
like your grandmother’s shawl
or a hat that keeps blowing away in the breezes.

Wear it gently,
and hold it like you hold a kite
the moment before you release it to wind.

Walk through these hours
the way you waded through the creek
or up and down the beach that day,
picking up smooth and shiny pebbles,
pocketing them for later.

Tiny stones of moments
to sift through your fingers,
testing their weight
and feeling their coolness,
to place in a tray on the table.

This one, you’ll say.
This.  And this.

 

Gratitude List:
1. Naps
2. A Fabulous farm crew
3. Memories of winter
4. Echoes of laughter
5. Remembering and looking forward

May we walk in Beauty!

Wind Commences to Sing

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

This one’s not mine.  It’s a Pima poem from In the Trail of the Wind: American Indian Poems and Ritual Orations that my friend Marie is letting me borrow.  I love the rhythm and imagery of this, and I want to copy it.

Wind Song

Wind now commences to sing;
Wind now commences to sing.
The land stretches before me,
Before me stretches away.

Wind’s house now is thundering.
Wind’s house now is thundering.
I go roaring over the land,
The land covered with thunder.

Over the windy mountains;
Over the windy mountains,
Came the myriad-legged wind;
The wind came running hither.

The Black Snake Wind came to me;
The Black Snake Wind came to me,
Came and wrapped itself about,
Came here running with its songs.

Gratitude List:
1.  May Day celebration at Wrightsville School.  Being known as Ellis’s mom.
2.  Still envisioning, creating a long-term plan amidst the short-term frenzy.
3.  Waking up in the morning creating lesson plans.  I think I am still a teacher.
4.  Flying Ms. Suzy’s marvelous kites!
5.  Sympathy card from the vet’s office.

May we walk in Beauty!