poem

More from the Queen of Swords

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

I’m just a seer, not a sibyl.
Thing is, no one seems to get the difference.
Expecting me to know the future,
to sniff the wind like a wolf
and Know.  Like that.
What’s coming up the pike.
How the caribou are moving in the valley.
Whether someone is about to leave the room.

I’m really always the last one to know.
Call it the handicap of my profession.
So much lies outside my sensing.
Perhaps I am the wolf indeed,
smelling the rabbit in the underbrush
but missing the smell of fire
when the wind blows the other way.

The little breezes that blow
this way and that
and swirl around the valley,
they only serve to tickle my nose,
to confuse my brain.
I need a strong and steady wind
from one direction to get my bearings.

It doesn’t make me a liar
and it doesn’t make you a fraud.
But now I see what you meant
about the lonely tundra.

2013 April 025

Gratitude List:
1.  Forsythia:  Last summer the township butchered our poor neglected forsythia that they deemed to be growing too close to the road.  She took those wounded arms, laid them out on the ground, and dug her fingers into the soil.  So many little bushes growing from her wounds!
2.  More birdsong:  Screech Owl in the afternoon, and cuckoo, and woodpecker.  More more more mockingbird.
3.  Breaking the rules.  This is about poetry and then maybe it’s not.  Perhaps it’s about springtime and the poem I am going to write soon about her big boots.
4.  Fatboy Slim and Praise.  And love poetry, sensual and praiseful.
5.  The sun.  Did I say the sun?  Yesterday I said Vitamin D which means the sun and means that something is blooming inside me.  And oops, I mentioned spring in #3 already, but there it is again.  And did I say that I would be starting to break the rules?
May we walk through poems.

Look Out the Window

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

My friend Mara’s poetry Prompt from last Saturday (I’m a late bloomer):  “Look out the window. Notice what’s there. Notice what’s not there. Write about it.”

Outside my window in the dying day
the little wooden spring house
is a smudge of white
set among the briars
at the edge of the little bosque.

Outside my window
the pear tree begins
to push its leaves
into being.

Like the fox that dashed
over the hillside in the winter
you have passed
through this place
and away.
I wish I could have offered you both
a place of safety.

April 045

Gratitude List:
1.  The bombastic and creative robot parade.  Hours of fun with cardboard boxes.
2.  Clearing away the vines
3.  Respectful disagreement, and how it helps me to be a better version of me when you respect me enough to disagree with me
4.  A new book of poetry is taking shape!
5.  Words, lovely words, especially adjectives: recursive, numinous, bombastic, noetic. . .

May we walk in beauty.

Queen of Swords

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

There it is, the way to close the book.
I’ll sit in my hut with the fire burning,
light to shine out on the wintry world.
My heart is here,
and you are welcome.

I will write my name on a stone,
and drop it into the pond
where the golden carp is waiting.
I will whisper it into the feathers
of the rusty screech owl
who huddles in the hollow of the sycamore.
I will of course tell the toad
who watches from her litter of leaves.

My heart, I think I said, is here,
and yours is welcome in this circle.

2013 April 010

My friend Sarah and I have been talking about Gratitude Lists, and the value of changing up the themes of the items.  Some days it takes an effort of will not to just make a list of five of the wing-people I have seen and heard from that day.

Gratitude List:
1.  The Pileated Woodpecker who called an announcement of his presence and then rowed through the sky across the hollow this afternoon.
2.  Phoebe has returned to the hollow, calling his name insistently from the walnut tree.
3.  Driving the tractor.  I love to drive the tractor.
4.  Delightful surprise of friends stopping in for a visit this afternoon.
5.  Moving forward, pushing through.
May we walk in beauty.

Fairy Tale and Fire-Breathing Bean Sprouts

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

First, a Poem, sort of tossed out of my brooding heart, out of this boat of me.  Perhaps I’ll breathe more freely if I can set this story free, and the poem may start to bend those bars.  After the poem, a Photo.  Then a Gratitude List.

Life in the Fairy Tale

It would help me to know
what my name is in this story.

Was I ever one of the innocent children
following the flowers
into the darkness of the forest?

I remember the day we came to that crossing,
the place where the paths diverged.
Isn’t the goddess supposed to sit there
wrapped in her robes, upon a stone?
Aren’t her dogs supposed to bark a warning?

I keep forgetting what happened next.
When did you hand me the impossible choice?
I would have been content to wait,
to sit on the stone and watch,
to see dark Hecate emerge
from between the two oak trees in the west,
to ask her a boon, to beg direction.

Instead I forged ahead into the wood,
taking neither path, the only way I knew.
This is the way.  This is the way I must go onward.
But I can no longer hear your footsteps
on the pathway to my left.

I will not simply let the story fade
into the shredded mists of morning.
Not until I know my name.

When Ellis saw these sprouts this morning, raising their
heads above the soil, he said, “They’re like dragons!  Breathing
their fire!”  Oh, my Boy.  By this evening, they’re all an inch taller.
What a wonder and a tenderness for him to take in.

2013 April 007

Gratitude List:
1.  Fire-Breathing Bean Sprouts
2.  Khalil Gibran and the tenderness of letting go, saying goodbye, remembering.
3.  The opening bud
4.  Choosing, even when the choices seem impossible
5.  Silk
May we walk in beauty.  And wonder.  And hope.

The Song of the Toad and the Little Birds

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

I am playing around with throwing some random pieces together to see how they fit.  This is a collage I will likely cut apart again and re-formulate at another time.  Perhaps.  Unless it seems to live as I live with it a little.

This is the blank page, the tabula rasa
the cloudless blue sky waiting to see
how the weather will fill it.
Sleep shrouding sense
muted and whispering.
This is the field in the springtime
ready for planting.

I cannot tell you everything.
I cannot tell you anything.
How can I be more explicit?
You disturbed the bee at her labor.
Your dreams broke the silence
of my garden.

We do not come this day bearing flowers.
We do not come this day singing songs of victory.
Weaving our silence
Bearing our candles
These are the gates we will enter
Bearing the weight of the war in our eyes.

What is the job of this poem?
So many things conspire to keep me asleep.
The heart is the vessel of response
not the information-gatherer.

There it is.
There it is again.
Coming back to the story
–always–
of the toad and the little birds.
Glittering.  Hard and cold.
Be watchful.  Be bold.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  There was a dairy farmer “who loved the land and his animals, and took very good care of them. . . .  He was a loving person with a very kind heart.”  For his kind heart and the gentle daughter he raised.
2.  For the beautiful Pequea Valley and a fierce wind to scour the worries away.
3.  For the silent and tricksy activism of my husband.  I cannot tell you what it is, for then it would no longer be his silent revolution.  Just know that behind the scenes he is making the world a better place for us all.  (No, he is not the real Banksy.)
4.  For the serious and earnest nature of my people, for their singing, their love of conversation, their care of the bereaved.  You sit in a Mennonite funeral and you can smell the food cooking downstairs and you know that everyone will be taken care of.
5.  For love, because we can love each other even when we don’t agree.  Because when it comes down to it, love is really what we need.

Much love.  So much love.

“Oh look!” said Joss.  “Roxanne [the car] has a mustache!”

2013 March 060

Trying to Break the Sense

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 4 Comments

My assignment for myself was to try to break the sense, break the sentence.  I was going to use the half-hour sessions of writing during the last three days to create fodder for this poem.  I stumbled a bit on that, and I never really broke out of the sentence.  But I have a little something interesting, I think.

Green is the toad word the
song of the morning the
hush of  a wee slamander
crouching beneath stars

I would be indigo
arcing through waterfall
I would be waterfall
dripping and gushing
I wonder when singing
reflects the rainbow
or whether my wandering greenness
displays a museum of dreams

Now that’s the brown metaphor
I was hunting
the hitching of zing to aha
There we go
Here we go
Falling beneath the wheel of the moment

And here’s a sunbeam
or off to the races we dance
but the moonlight is ticklish
and you’ve been in tangles
so when do we settle
like spiders in corners
to ponder the morning?

 

Gratitude List:
1.  “I love my snow day!” says Joss.  I concur.  Making snow people and eating snow and sledding.
2.  The beautiful necklace Ellis made for himself.  Focused work for hours.  And no self-consciousness about what is “gender appropriate.”
3.  That scrappy little wren who is threatening to make a nest in my garage.
4.  Finding the inner discipline to plan out my extremely busy week.  Planning ahead has actually become something that I have a great deal of resistance to, inwardly.  Pushing through whatever that is makes me feel like I have really accomplished something.
5.  Making the pizza myself, crust and all.  Why don’t we do that more often?

May we walk in beauty.

2013 March 149

The Wheel is Turning

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

A poem from 2006, to celebrate the turning of the year-wheel into Spring.

Day Turns

The way maple swings its wings spiraling down shafts of dawn wind,
The way chickadee whistles on bitter March mornings,
The way lichen spreads grey-green lace upon the patient rocks,
The way the egg falls from jay’s beak to lie silent, cold, and whole upon the moss,
The way the wren defends her nest,
The way rabbit hints at her home and scratches the packed earth,
The way squirrel scolds her wayward cousin’s child.
The way heron stands more still than thought,
The way the pond reflects the orange air at sunset,
The way snake stalks the field mouse through gathering dusk,
The way the fields are washed in the milk of the moon,
The way dark midnight covers the farm like a blanket.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Those little trees in the understory of the woods, the ones that don’t lose their leaves until spring, whose leaves are wisps of yellowed paper against the mottled floor of the wood.
2.  Finding a nearly-empty (but not quite!) jar of Chocolat in the back of the fridge
3.  The many colors of potatoes
4.  Reading books with the whole family
5.  Writing it down
May we walk in beauty.

Not sure why it scanned so blue, nor why I had the impulse to post it here tonight.  This is my Great-Aunt Lizzie (Elizabeth Weaver–I am named for her) and my Grandma Weaver (Marian Weaver, Lizzie’s sister-in-law).  Quilting.
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Susquehanna Alchemy

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

I wrote this one about a year ago, perhaps two.  There is a moment in the morning when the sun suddenly hits the River with a flash of pure gold.

Susquehanna Alchemy
 
Fragments of mist
roll down the ridge above the River,
peeling the veil
from Pisgah’s grey shoulders.
 
Pockets of fog
cloak the farms
in the folds of the valley.
 
Susquehanna meanders,
a twisting ribbon of lead
in the dawn.
 
Above, a blue heron
plies a patient path
through cold currents
on its way to fishing.
 
Wren, sparrow and finch
send threads of brilliance
into the bowl of sky:
“Here. Here. Here. I am here.”
Their voices spiral upward.
 
A chilly breeze disturbs
the fleecy tail of a squirrel
who has paused
halfway
down a grey-brown
trunk of oak.
 
The wintry skeletons of maples
wear the green auras of early spring.
Sun touches the branches,
tempers them with silver
in the first light.
 
One day you will remember to look
and the fresh nests of birds
will be hidden
amid a riot of green.
 
You turn off the spine of the mountain.
You slide from the ridge of Mt. Pisgah,
winding your way along a streamlet
which hastens toward the river’s embrace.
 
A stone schoolhouse with boarded windows
sits amid a scholarship
of dried ivy vines
and last fall’s nettle stalks.
 
Among the wrinkled hollows and hills
you curve away from the river and back again.
Now you turn onto the river road.
 
Birdsong has lost the insistent shrill of dawn.
The last mist of morning
dissipates before you.
The sun slides a glance
off the surface of grey water,
and sparkles of gold appear.
 
Gold grows on the water,
transforming lead,
and in a moment
you will avert your eyes
from its blinding dazzle.
 

Gratitude List:
1.  Spring Tonic–the boys and I went wandering this morning, found several leaves of plantain, chickweed, nettles, henbit and ground ivy, stick-stalks of mint, sage and thyme.  We made a tea-tonic out of it all.
2.  Collaborative artwork with my children.  This photo is one Josiah and I made this morning.  It’s a cardinal family in a nest.  The red blobs above the nest are daytime fireworks, according to one of the artists:
2013 March 056

3.  Flaky biscuits and hot soup
4.  Being understood
5.  A new poet to learn: Ada Limon
May we walk in beauty.  So, so much beauty.

Guest Poet: Kyla Rose Robbins

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

In January, one of the prompts that I posted for the poem-a-day run was to write a poem that was a secret or a lie.  I didn’t know how many people out might actually be writing along.  This evening Kyla Rose Robbins gave me permission to post her Secret Poem here on the blog. 

Sometimes, at night, I can’t close my eyes
I’m too scared to be alone
Loneliness was your biggest fear, so I never left your sight
I told you things I never told myself
You told me nothing at all
So forget the words I said that night
And I’ll remember nothing

–Kyla Rose Robbins

Every time I read it, I find myself holding my breath, and then I feel my heart start up again.  Thank you, Kyla!

 

Gratitude List

1.  Marmite
2.  The Bookwitch and her stories
3.  Sharing poetry, opening the heart
4.  Good, co-operative play time
5.  This stinky purring person on my lap

Namaste.

Song for Poets: A Poem for Brighid’s Day

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today we look for that jolly rodent, and also we commemorate Brighid, triple goddess and patroness of Ireland, Saint of Kildare.  Smithcraft, poetry, and healing arts are her realms.  Sacred wells, undying flame.

We forge our words on your anvil,
listening for the sweet ping
of hammer on metal,
watching the sparks fly outward,
shaping and crafting.

We seek them like wild herbs
found only on the side of a mountain
for a short season each year.
We search under bracken,
through briar and thorn,
stepping through bogs,
listening for the birdsong
that tells us we have arrived
at the proper place.

We give ourselves to words,
not waiting for inspiration,
but chasing it like skuthers of fog
over the misty hills.
Seeking the solace and healing
that words offer,
and turning our minds
to do that healing work.
Crafting our words
into tools and enticements.

A year and a day
the old ones would pledge
to your service.
So may it be.
One year of poetry,
making it, reading it.

Oh Lady, give us poetry.

 

Gratitude List:

1.  Another day of no fighting.  This is like a miracle.  Really.
2.  Ground beef rolls with cheese roux like Odongo used to make.  With kale.
3.  Choosing my own path.
4.  Mary Oliver and synchronicity and magic.
5.  Stars.

May we walk in beauty.

2013 February 024
Red Russian kale in the snow.  Before I ate it.