poem

(Blank) Sheet, a Grouchy Little Poem

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

<Prompt 4: (Blank) Sheet> I really did have this one finished yesterday, but I fell asleep in the recliner while I was waiting for my turn at the computer.  I am having a little more trouble trusting Mockingbird this year.  I want my poems to be just a little more polished before I post them.  I don’t want to go with first impulses, which feel flimsy and light.  Instead of trusting that writing will bring the inspiration, I am waiting around and pushing for it.  Then I get stuck.  So this poem turned into a complaint.  Here goes:

A sure-fire method to freeze the gears,
to gum up the fine workings of the Muse:

Tell the poet to write
about the Blank Sheet.

The Blank Sheet is the yawning chasm
we stare into, the poet’s dark
and treacherous Void.
It draws me in like a moth
to the challenge and the danger.

Tell me not to think about the elephant
and suddenly everywhere I see an elephant.

 

I need to keep reminding myself that the first time I did this, lots of days were duds.  The whole point is to keep the lines open, to keep fluid and hopeful, to begin to shape the inner work of the daily life into pieces of a poetic puzzle that fit together.  Even though something in me is cringing at my early attempts, this grouchy little poem is exactly what I needed today, even if it won’t make the chapbook.  Today’s prompt (I will try to be more prompt in execution) is a two-fer: Write a concealed poem.  Unconceal everything.

2013 November 008

Gratitude List:
1.  Pushing through
2.  Those leaves!  I feel as I if I died and went to Vermont.
3.  Rilke
4.  Elephants
5.  Endings and Beginnings: Today begins the last week of CSA shares for the 2014 season.  Now we gear up for December shares.

May we walk in Beauty.

Just a Minute

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

After yesterday’s lai, my friend Mara sent me a link to an interview with the poet Cathy Smith Bowers, who worked with another short form, the minute.

A minute is three stanzas in length, each of twenty syllables (60 total, like a minute).  The rhyme scheme is aabb, ccdd, eeff.  And the kicker is that the meter is iambic: ba-dum-ba-dum-ba-dum-ba-dum.  Sort of like Shakespeare, but with fewer feet.

This one’s tricky.  Even when the meter and rhyme seem to come easily, it’s a real challenge to get it to dance rather than stumble.  But Mockingbird says that you learn to dance by taking those first stumbling steps.

Out in the dawn, a misty sea
in walnut tree
a silent crow
will dream of snow

will ruffle feathers in the chill
will wait until
the first bright ray
begins the day

then with a final shake will rise
from branch to skies
and this will be
a memory

Ha!  Well, that was fun.  Mockingbird says I am not supposed to make fun of it or try to explain its inadequacy, so I’ll let it stand for today’s poem.

2013 October 081

Gratitude List:
1.  Getting a card in the mail!  Just for hello-and-I-love-you.  What a delight.  And there was a tiny picture of an artist’s palette on the back that inspired Ellis to draw and draw and draw.  Thank you, Auntie Mary!  I love you, too!
2.  New soft. warm rug underfoot
3.  Faery-light.  I don’t know another word for it–the way the vegetables glow and shine from within, even when there is no obvious light source nearby.  Yesterday, the tomatoes seemed to glow from within.  Radishes, potatoes, carrots, when they’re wet, take on a light and color that seem to be beyond the capacity of the available light to create.
4.  New perspectives.  Rearranging the furniture, literally and figuratively.
5.  The way frost outlines every leaf, every blade of grass, every bud and vein.  My children say Jack Frost is just a made-up thing, but I’ve seen some of his best work.

Beauty all around us.

Back to Form

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

2013 October 058

Winter is coming on, and I am feeling the pull to go inward, to explore new poetic forms.  This one I discovered on Robert Brewer’s Poetic Asides blog.  It is a French form called a lai.  It’s good for me to get back to the anxious thrill of writing something for the fun and playfulness of it, and not simply because there are words knocking at the back door of my head asking to be let out.

It’s 9 lines.  The 5-syllable lines (1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8) are rhyme A, and the others are 2 syllables and are rhyme B.  Here goes:

Either moon or frost
has whitely embossed
the field.
I wake, having crossed
the sea of sleep, tossed,
concealed
within my own lost
ark.  Now, waking’s cost.
I yield.

Hmmm.  Perhaps I ought to have been a little more intentional about choosing rhymes instead of diving in head first and letting the rhymes find me.  Nah.  That was fun.  Sort of like a tanka, but with the added imperative of rhyme.  And that happy little skip in the last lines of the triads could be used comically or very seriously, I think.  I started with the first thing that jumped into my head, so I was stuck with -ost as my major rhyme.  Initially I typed “grass” instead of “field,” but was limited by that rhyme.  Now that’s an exercise to wake me up.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  The artistic power of limits
2.  Colored pencils
3.  Warm rug for winter
4.  Cleaning the attic
5.  Civility

Beauty All Around Us.

Prodigal as Love

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

yellow walnut leaves
twist and twirl silently earthward
lavishly giving themselves to breeze, to breath
prodigal as love

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Dreams.  And dreams.
2.  Passages, fledgings, relinquishments
3.  Raisin bread toasted
4.  Swallows migrating through
5.  New rhythms

May we walk in Beauty.

Clouds, Gardens and Everything Comes Together

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

These are the days when I become a quiet rock,
a quivering leaf, an ear of lichen
listening to the stones grow.
The words have wandered away,
eloquence eludes me,
and all my sentences begin
with the word So.

Wind will sing in my feathers
but my own story waits
like a seed in the heart of earth,
like a dream that must rise through mud,
a bubble, the nymph of a damselfly
crawling through centuries
up the stalk of a smooth green reed
to be born to the blue light.

There is a roaring in my ears
like the sound of grief or rage.
But it is only the lazy hum of summer,
of fireflies clicking their rhythms
into the velvet indigo of solstice,
communing with the moon.

Another day I’ll dawn,
but for now I will sink
slowly into the pond
with Grandmother Moon
and leave my message with the fish.

2013 June 141
The makings of a batch of medicine bags: spinning the wool, crocheting, and adding beads and cord.  Portable and easy to fit in the spaces of a busy season.

Gratitude List:
1.  Clouds.  Not cloudiness, which is its own sort of blessing at times.  But clouds, those Michelangelo works of art that have been so magnificent in the recent spate of changeable weather.
2.  Vegetable Gardens.  Have you seen it, too?  Everywhere, woven through people’s flower patches, a few tomato cages, a wide-spreading squash.  Or off to the side of the house–out front, even–tidy or  wanton, fenced or flowing vegetable gardens.  If this crazy economy has been good for anything, I think it has empowered people to remember that they can grow their own food.
3.  The way things come together sometimes, even when you’re not quite trying.  This is especially nice when I remember the times when things haven’t come together, even when I’ve tried desperately.
4.  Day lilies and chicory.  Bright orange stars on all the back-road banks, and chicory’s beautiful blue eyes, almost as sparkly as my Jonny’s.  Let’s throw in some lace, shall we?  Queen Anne has plenty to spare.  And something golden to balance the lace–buttercups!  And just here, a cascade of lush lavender vetch.  Oh summer!  You fill my spirit.
5.  Making.  There are moments in these busy days when I have to sit down and rest, but my hands still want something to do.  I have found my way back to making again, and am satisfied.

May we walk in Beauty.

Waking Up

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Like the remnants of fog burning away in the morning sun
the last rags of dream whisper through the valleys
of my waking brain, gnats caught in the cobwebs of consciousness.

In the beginning of the year, the drops of mist form words
and a sentence emerges like a sapling from the fog:
All that I have been is compounded in the present moment.

One morning I wake and the spiders whisper the name
of an impossibly green stone, like poison, like miracles:
Dioptase, a viridian eye that sends forth the tentacles of the heart.

Or a song will be ringing in my ears as I tiptoe downstairs
in the dawn: Give yourself to love, if love is what you’re after.
Open up your heart to the tears and the laughter.

I gather the strands of silk and wool and hope that have caught
on the fences between the world of waking and sleeping,
and weave them into the story of the day, the week, the year.

There was this one: I am walking down a sunny city street
and am filled suddenly with foreboding, knowledge of a Terrible Presence.
I know that it will destroy me, and the world, if it senses my recognition.

The key, I learned without learning,
is to keep that knowledge hidden in the back of my brain
and cover it up with gratitude and joy and hope.

(Already I know that I will be revising this poem, to make it less self-referential, less plodding.  But I wanted to get it down today, and this is the place where I do this work.  Welcome to my process.)

Gratitude List:
1.  Towhee is back.  Ellis misidentified him as the orchard oriole.  If you know the two birds or have a bird book handy, you’ll understand why that makes me proud.  He’s getting his birder’s eyes on.
2.  Weighing cheese for the farm store with Ellis.  Impromptu math lesson on rounding up and down to the nickel.
3.  Chocolate cake/brownie goodness.  We have discovered the Grand Unifying Theory.  This is the basis of everything.  I love the Saturday crew.
4.  Phoebe babies in the barn.  It reminded me of the lovely book which my Great Aunt Lizzie gave to us when we were children.  I will read it to my own children again this coming week as we wait for the little ones to fledge.
5.  Ellis making the point that one of the things that is important to him is taking care of the very smallest ones.
(Hmmm.  A lot of Ellis in this list.  He’s a special kid, and so is his brother.)

May we walk in Beauty!

Boxful of Dreams Come True

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

How does one receive
a boxful of dreams come true?
I will name the man in the big brown truck
a priest or professor.  Do I bow or kneel to receive it,
the sunlight sparkling
through leaves of dogwood.
Just stand and smile,
and take it into my hands.
Are there ritual words of thanks and blessing?
Can you know, good sir,
how this act, this moment,
changes me from one thing to another?
How the moment I turn
and walk away from you
I have become something else,
something else entirely?

Song of the Toad
Click on the photo to purchase it on Amazon.

Gratitude List:
1.  My book is here!
2.  The strawberries are in
3.  I won the May Poetry Contest on Versify
4.  That weather out there is as perfect as it can get, and something about perfect weather makes me feel whole and happy.
5.  Did I mention that my book came today?

May we walk in beauty.

The Way You Walk Toward Healing

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Gratitude List:
1.  Brown thrashers on the lawn in the gloaming
2.  The hope of the hummingbird (soon, soon!)
3.  Such pleasant temperatures and cool breezes
4.  Wise friends
5.  The way you walk toward healing.
And I mean you.
So many people I know have lived
through such losses.
Lived, and then chosen
somehow, to put a foot forward
then another, to take the next breath
when your chest has been crushed by grief.
Perhaps you cannot understand this
or perhaps you can:
you have unleashed into the world
such bigness of grace
in those moments of choosing
just the next step, the next breath.
It may have felt like a slog
or like nothing, or hell
but you walked on, you breathed.
Take it for what it is worth:
some learning soul somewhere
has noticed and seen it
for the grace that it is.

May we walk in beauty.

Don’t Know Where It Came From

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

Today green the sun rose
and red down again descended.
Sang high in golden birds were singing,
wild the morning spent.

Before the west began in shadow,
out of yonder called the day.
Within the margin birds at vespers
all for indigo, for summons.

Release!  The day, the wander
wondering in the finches’ song.
I would have dawned a tangerine sun
but the orb forgave my tardiness.

Gratitude List:
1.  The way sun twinkles through oak leaves.
2.  Butter-yellow Tiger Swallowtail.
3.  Always beginning again.
4.  Water is flowing.
5.  There is no expiration date on my dreams.

May we walk in Beauty!

Tanka Play

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

For tonight, a little tanka, a syllable count poem of five lines (5/7/5/7/7). I am not sure exactly where this came from, but sometimes you just have to let a poem happen, as Winnie the Pooh says you should.

Well, They Do

The tree is behind
the big red barn is behind
the swing is behind
the sweat lodge frame is behind
the field where vultures lay eggs.

Here is a picture of an African Eagle Owl, not a vulture.  Just because.2013 May 032

Gratitude List:
1.  First Responders
2.  Red Poppy
3.  Second Chances
4.  Warm Hugs
5.  General Silliness

May we walk in Beauty.