poem

Elegy

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today, an elegy.  Sigh.  I don’t really want to go that direction.

I feel like I have really overblown the good memories of earlier Poem-a-Day experiences.  Looking back on that first November, I feel like every poem was a hit, or nearly so.  And I feel like I am pulling out my own teeth to get the words to flow this month.  Of course, not all my poems back in that first experience were winners, and I think that this month I at least have some good fodder to work with at the end of the month.

Mockingbird says, “Sometimes it’s like that.  Sometimes you don’t feel inspired or inspiring.  Write anyway.  Get out the dreck so you can let the pure clear waters flow.”  Ack.  Mockingbird.  Maybe I liked your growling better.

Elegy

I have not named it yet, this distance,
this door that stands between us.
Or I have, actually, I suppose,
but when a dragon sheds its skin
it takes on a new name befitting its changes,
and perhaps our story is like that,
needing a new naming
for each of the skins we have scratched off.

First, I called it Waiting.
Me waiting for you to call out
from your side of the door,
to say you needed me now,
to say you would be taking visitors again.

I made forays, you cannot say I didn’t,
and you met me, and that part
was called Wrestling and Wrangling.
I thought we were making progress
at opening that heavy door.

But it stays closed.
And I have sat here on this side of it,
worrying and brooding, and frustrated and sad,
for years, perhaps, and the cobwebs are heavy
upon me.  So heavy.  They weigh like shame.

I sat here so long simply waiting,
wondering whether I ought to just leave,
that I didn’t hear you tiptoe
off into the distance on your side of the door.

I think this is an elegy.
What comes next
will not be part of this story anymore.

Perhaps we’ll meet again,
newborn and fresh,
somewhere in Rumi’s field,
and that will be a new thing,
and I will bless it heartily.

(Now I will brush the cobwebs aside.
Now I will stand and step away from the door.)

2014 April 068
The view from High Point to the bridges.

Gratitude List:
1. Pink-nosed calf frolicking in the field and its careful mama keeping watch
2. Pink trees blooming everywhere
3. Snowball guineas on Ducktown Road
4. Putting it to rest
5. More and more poems on the Poetree

May we walk in Beauty!

When the Heart Rises

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today’s Prompt is a Two for Tuesday prompt: Write a love poem/write an anti-love poem.

When I said to you in that dream
that the sky was wandering over the hill,
what I meant was that I knew your heart
would always find its own true pathway.

When you replied that you would stay within earshot,
even if the wind tore your voice from you,
I knew that you meant that your heart
could be shattered and still your roots would thrive.

When I told you that I would be waiting
here, on this side of the great wooden door,
I know you understood that my heart
would be listening for your rising.

When you sang of the waters of Lethe,
how you longed to drink, but turned homeward,
I knew that you had given your heart,
like a Phoenix, to the story.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  I am not alone here
2. Breeze
3. Addressing fear
4. Palo santo
5. Stories of the moon

May we walk in Beauty!

If I Were to Read a Poem to My Mockingbird

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today’s Prompt is an If I Were. . . poem.

Mockingbird growls.  In between riffs
of cardinal and killdeer, of phoebe and wren
and some feathered neighbor from the south
whose name I don’t know, in between all that,
mockingbird growls at me.

He growled tonight when I started to read to him:
Mary Oliver’s Mockingbirds.
I was certain he’d be flattered,
but he growled at me
and fluffed his feathers,
twitched his tail,
and when I got to the part
about the old people dying
and the gods clapping their great wings,
he opened his own and took flight,
off up the orchard into the twilight.

He’s not such a good listener, that one.
But we often forgive our loquacious friends
their lack of listening skills
because they entertain us with such gusto.

But the hens.  The hens listened, rapt,
clucking like fans at a jazz fest.
And when I bowed, and walked up
to close the coop for the night,
they all asked for my autograph.

 

Gratitude List:
1. My sweet hens
2. Comfort food
3. Gathas
4. Sun-kiss
5. Learning from uncertainty.

May we walk in Beauty!

Abandon Hope

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today’s Prompt is to use a standard phrase for the title of your poem, and then to respond to that.  I have to start working on these earlier in the day, before my brain starts to shut down.

Abandon Hope all Ye Who Enter Here
with apologies and thanks to Pema Chodron and Margaret Wheatley

“Hope. . . is not the conviction that something will turn out well,
but the certainty that something makes sense regardless
of how it turns out.”  –Vaclav Havel

I have a fierce attachment to hope,
to that inward knowing
that this boat will stay afloat no matter what.

I have a deep-rooted, heavy-booted fear
that in this moment
we are in the very act of sinking.

Like they say, the hope keeps me living,
living in the middle of the fear,
and paralyzed to move,
lest my shift cause this bark to sink.

Perhaps the future demands not hope,
but willingness to sleep with uncertainty.
That we lay our heads on pillows of rock,
and though we know not whether the day will dawn,
sleep soundly through the storm.

Though we know the fight is likely useless,
onward we fight because it makes sense
to hold our ideals no matter what we face.

Oh, I’ll hold hope in my pocket–
uncoupled from its sticky twin–
like a shiny copper penny,
like a talisman.

 

 

Gratitude List:
1. Mockingbird is back on stage, in rare form, full of gossip and outlandish tales.  He got me this morning–I started to say, “Killdeer!” before he was off on a riff about cardinal, before I realized it was him.
2.  Chickweed pesto
3.  Windflower and speedwell
4.  Cloud constellations (a term coined by my younger child)
5.  Joss found my glasses in the field when I was sure that they were gone for good.  No scratches.  Whew.

May we walk in Beauty!

 

Violence and Peace

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Since it is Tuesday, the poetry prompt is a two-part poem:  Write a poem about violence and/or peace.
Here is my #readapoem aloud poem for today.

 

In the spring, there are skunk cabbages,
purple pods rising from the marshes,
spathe and spadix (look them up)
scenting the air, first in the race
to lure the waking pollinators.

Snowdrops and aconite bring the wood alive,
their blossoms whispering amid breezes,
the buzz of the first honeybees,
the Louisiana waterthrush singing
about the creek that mutters over stones.

And at night, while the owls utter longing
to the moon, and a drizzle coats the moonlit branches,
the mud salamanders wriggle from their winter burrows
and slither down to the vernal pools to lay their precious eggs.

What will they do when the bulldozers come?
When the trucks arrive with their gravel and pipes?
Where will the birds find quiet branches for nesting,
the spotted salamanders find soft muddy springs for their young?

Someone has studied it, surely,
made a proposal based on plan
which is based on a study
which dismisses in fine language
the impact of pipelines on wildlife
in tender wild places.

The chances of leaks in the pipe
are slim to nothing, so they say.
Tell that to the ducks of Mayflower,
to the marshes of Ripley, Missouri.
Tell it to the wheat farmers of Tioga,
to the wildflowers of the Oak Glen Nature Preserve.

Tell it to the tender dogtooth violets
before you tear them from the soil,
to the otters who dance on the creek banks.
Tell it to the shy hermit thrush
before you slash through the wood
with your heavy machinery.

We cannot unring this bell.
We cannot unkill the wild.
We cannot unbreak our hearts.

 

Gratitude List:
1.   Louisiana Waterthrush
2.  Toads sing!  I did not know this when I named my book.  Turn on your sound and click here.
3.  A sense of purpose in uncertain times
4.  Fresh energy
5.  Chaperoning a field trip

May we walk in Beauty!

Self-Portrait

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

The Prompt for today’s poem is to write a Self-Portrait Poem.  It is late and I am so very sleepy.  This will have to do.

I want my heart to be a singing bowl,
drawing forth your resonance,
and sending it back, shining and quivery,
shimmering threads of sound dancing in the air.

I want my ears to be baskets of soft meadow grass,
holding the stories like fragile eggs,
letting the rain trickle through.

My face is the wide sky, round, a doorway.
My face is the guardian, standing in shadow.
My face is a table.  My face is a window.

I will remember your face forever,
but when I turn from this mirror,
my picture will fade, and I will be only
a dream of myself, a lost story.

I want my eyes to be sponges.
I want my colors to pulsate and flash.
I want my hands rain droplets
from the healing river.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  A little help from my friends
2.  Sleep
3.  Resonance and reflection
4.  Challengers and Initiators
5.  The inevitability of spring

May we walk in Beauty!

 

Susquehanna Dawning

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Fred

Today I got a card in the mail from a friend.  There were bluebirds on the cover and it was full of poetry.  These.

The Poetry Prompt for today is to write a poem about Discovery.

Susquehanna Dawning

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 waters.

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 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 give you
there, as the sun spreads the golden road before you?

 

Gratitude List:
1. A warm purring cat on my lap.
2. Kind words.  Always be kinder than necessary.  People are.  So often.
3.  Watching Looney Tunes with the kids.  How they laugh!
4. Getting real mail in the mailbox.  Not bills or Netflix or checks or flyers, but real mail.
5.  Guides

May we walk in Beauty!

Lost Language

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today’s Poem-a-Day Prompt is to write a message poem.

Lost Language

A bark-stripped twig along the path
etched with the burrowers’ runes.

Creekside, the wide webbed prints
of heron’s cuneiform stamp.

Overhead, shifting shapes
of scripts in the migrating flock.

A scatter of leaves on the pavement.
The pattern of bees zipping through sun rays.

When did I unlearn this language?
When did I forget how to read this alphabet?

A message that slips out of memory
just as it reaches the back of my throat.

The last hazy image of a dream.
The world is waiting to be read.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Getting out there.  Deciding.  Starting the search.
2.  I found my old resumes, my portfolio, my syllabi and course schedules from when I taught community college fifteen years ago.  That old me, the younger one, wasn’t too bad.  If she could do that, I think maybe the newer me, the older one, can manage it, too.
3.  A new pair of shoes.  I’m sort of saying that to try to mitigate the sadness that the old ones finally gave up the ghost this morning.  Really, a pair of sturdy, stylish and comfortable shoes that lasts for ten years–there’s some deeper meaning there.
4.  Opening doors for the Universe to pour in.  (Oooops.  I accidentally typed “pout” there.  Heh.)
5.  That poem by Mary Oliver about death, about being married to amazement.

May we walk in Beauty, in Amazement!

How the World Began

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Welcome to National Poetry Month!

So much to do!  I was away from home all day today, so tomorrow I will inaugurate this year’s Poetree in my dogwood.
Stacia Fleegal of the poetry blog Versify offers a challenge to read a poem a day.  I won’t put all mine on videotape, but here’s today’s attempt.
I think I will try the April Poem-A-Day Challenge again.  Today’s prompt is a two-fer: Write a Beginning poem.  Write an Ending poem.

How the World Began

In the beginning, Spider
launched herself into the spring breeze
from a rattling stalk of dried nettle

toward a skinny maple sapling.
She missed the maple.  Landed,
light-foot, in a heap of leaves

gathered around its base.
A quick scuttle upward, launched again
and through the breeze once more

to nettle stalks this time, and
the gossamer cord caught.
Then launched herself once more

into the gentle breath of wind
until she’d spun herself a world,
until she had encompassed all.

In the end, Spider gathered strands
and wove herself a spirit cloth of silver thread
to catch the wandering dreams

of mockingbirds and wild geese
passing over the chilly meadow,
following tomorrow’s sunrise.

 

Gratitude List:

1.  Flicker calling from the treetops this morning
2.  The golden flank feathers of the pheasant who walked through my parents’ lawn this afternoon, and his squeaky screen-door squawk.
3.  The Fool, dancing on the edge, willing to take risks, to laugh lightly at herself, to seek adventure.
4.  Energy.  Taking responsibility for my own, learning to sense it, to listen for it, to watch, to shift it.
5.  The smoke ring that emerged from the palo santo smudge that Nicky used this morning, how it rose so languidly through the grapevines, twisted, turned for a moment into a baby dragon, and dissipated like a mist, like a wraith.

May we walk in Beauty!

Wanton

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

For instance, the crocus and anemone
have leaked past the bricks
that line the edge of the bed.

For instance, the wind.

For instance, those people
blew in through the door,
climbed all those flights of stairs,
and sat down to tell me their stories.

For instance, it has taken me
three days to clear my yard of branches.

For instance, this joy
wanders into the house
even when the doors are closed
against the last blast of winter.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Sometimes it seems like you have to get attached to Plan B in order for the tricksy Universe to commit to making Plan A happen.  I am grateful for today’s full schedule (Plan A), and a project to do another day (Plan B).  I don’t mean to disparage the Universe by this–it keeps one on one’s toes, eh?
2.  Crocus and anemone leaking all over the yard.
3.  Hey, that snow was pretty!  No, I never thought I would use those two words in a sentence again, either.  At least not this soon.
4.  Reiki tomorrow
5.  The web of interconnection.  How the cards you draw have messages for me, too.

May we walk in Beauty!