Poetry

Making Tuesday’s News

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

It’s not my most poetic of poems, but RLB’s prompt at Writers Digest was to write a news poem, and right now, I’m preparing my inner self to deal with the this coming Tuesday’s news. I kind of copped out at the end. . .

What will you do with Tuesday’s news?
Will you lose your head in a whirling tizzy
or sink into a slough of desperate sadness?
Will you dance on political graves
of the ones you wanted to vanquish?
Will you wear a crown of gloating laurels?

Will you follow the call of your guru and your gut
to make the world a kinder place?
Will you follow the call of your humanity
to make the space more humane?
Will you call out the gleeful cruelty,
and stand up for those who were left behind?

What will you do for democracy?
What will you do for your neighbor?

Really, please vote. Please help to stand up to the forces of fascism. Stand up for kindness and goodness and love and democracy.

Gratitude List:
1. Democracy–it’s really a good idea
2. Kindness
3. Zooming with my beloveds
4. The color! Oh, the color!
5. How prayer changes me
May we walk in Beauty!

“Walked for half an hour in the garden. A fine rain was falling, and the landscape was that of autumn. The sky was hung with various shades of gray, and mists hovered about the distant mountains – a melancholy nature. The leaves were falling on all sides like the last illusions of youth under the tears of irremediable grief. A brood of chattering birds were chasing each other through the shrubberies, and playing games among the branches, like a knot of hiding schoolboys. Every landscape is, as it were, a state of the soul, and whoever penetrates into both is astonished to find how much likeness there is in each detail.” —Henri Frederic Amiel

Chasing Chickens
by Elizabeth Weaver-Kreider
.
I’ve counted my chickens.
A dozen times or more they’ve dashed–
dashed, I tell you–
into blackberry canes,
wings whirring.
.
White clouds of dust engulf me.
Their voices chuckle
from the cliff’s edge.
Don’t tell me about chickens.
I’m green, baby. Green.
And I don’t know how
I’m getting home from here.
—Beth Weaver-Kreider

There is a legend that has its roots buried deep inside the prehistoric culture of these lands. It is a myth that was seeded before the stories were anchored onto the page, before rigid systems of belief tied gods and spirits into names and form, even before the people were persuaded from paths of individual responsibility into hierarchies of power. This story has been fluid and flowing, changing shape and growing over many thousands of years. It is a story of ancestors and a deep relationship with the ancient land. It is a story of memories that permeate stone and wood to rest within the body of the earth. This legend is too old to be defined by history and therefore we are not limited in our own remembering of it; creative recollection lies at the heart of our very best tales.

Memory may arrive at odd moments and in unexpected forms. Recognition may unravel along strange paths. Wherever the wild reaches through the land, we may touch the edges of this story. We start to tease out a thread, then pick and pull until first a fragment of colour, then a whole strand of story, is revealed. Now we peel away the layers, glimpse the traces of a design, watch a pattern grow until an entire story emerges, then a cycle of stories, and now we are unwinding the fabric of our ancestors’ lives.” —Carolyn Hillyer

We stumble on the journey, O God.
We lose heart along the way.
We forget your promises and blame one another.
Refresh us with the springs of your spirit in our souls
and open our senses to your guiding presence
that we may be part of the world’s healing this day,
that we may be part of the world’s healing.
—John Philip Newell

Perilous

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment
Art by Beth and AI.

Today’s Poetry Prompt, suggested by Robert Lee Brewer of Writers Digest, is Peril. This one feels incomplete. . .

Oh Lady of the Labyrinth,
Mother of Midnight,
Queen of the star-strewn Heavens,
only now do I know that I need not pray
that the way will be windswept and winsome,
that the dreams will be joyful and golden.

For it was on the perilous path that you found me,
and the moment I stumbled you came to my aid.
When the road was encumbered by shadows,
you grasped my hand and said, “Follow.”

Gratitude List:
1. An absolutely pleasant day
2. All the colors of autumn
3. Riding Rail Bikes at Seven Valleys
4. Cats in the family
5. An extra hour
May we walk in Beauty.

“Safety is not the absence of threat.
It is the presence of connection.” —Gabor Maté

“Mercy is the willingness to enter into the chaos of another.” —James Keenan

Expose yourself to your deepest fear. After that, you are free.” —Jim Morrison

“You need not wade through the mists and bogs to reach the moon.
You need not climb a ladder of cobweb.
You need not ride the stallions that wicker in the sea’s pounding surf.

Draw back the curtain and open the window.
Breathe the bracing air and listen:
The whinny of an owl, the click of the bat,
The grunt of a buck and the distant roar of the train.

The full moon will spill a milky road before you.
That is all the pathway you will need.”
—Beth Weaver-Kreider

“The word is the making of the world.” —Wallace Stevens

“Through the empty branches the sky remains.
It is what you have.” —Rainer Maria Rilke

“The leaves of the tree become as pages of the Sacred Book to one who is awake.”
—Hazrat Inayat Khan

“Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.” —Albert Einstein

“I must remind you that starving a child is violence. Suppressing a culture is violence. Neglecting school children is violence. Punishing a mother and her family is violence. Discrimination against a working man is violence. Ghetto housing is violence. Ignoring medical need is violence. Contempt for poverty is violence.” —Coretta Scott King

“When you feel the suffering of every living thing in your own heart, that is consciousness.” —Bhagavad Gita

“And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
―Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart.”
―Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“Just that,” said the fox. “To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world….”
―Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“It is such a mysterious place, the land of tears.”
―Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me. You will always be my friend. You will want to laugh with me. And you will sometimes open your window, so, for that pleasure . . . And your friends will be properly astonished to see you laughing as you look up at the sky! Then you will say to them, ‘Yes, the stars always make me laugh!’ And they will think you are crazy. It will be a very shabby trick that I shall have played on you…”
―Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.”
―Naomi Shihab Nye

Misguided

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment
Art: “A New Beginning” by Beth and the AI. Prompt: “Write a Misguided poem,” by Robert Lee Brewer of The Writers Digest.

Take the misbegotten moment,
the misinterpreted glance,
the misguided misapprehension,
and the miserable chance.
Take the mistakes you’ve made,
the misjudgments.
Take the mischief and the misaim.
Then take out your finest eraser,
and start all over again.

Gratitude List:
1. Chances to start over
2. The second half
3. Revision
4. StoryCorps
5. Lemon Drops
May we walk in Beauty!

“Awake, my dear. Be kind to your sleeping heart. Take it out into the vast fields of light and let it breathe.” —Hafiz

“Mercy is the willingness to enter into the chaos of another.” —James Keenan

“The heavens are sweeping us along in a cyclone of stars.” —Teilhard de Chardin

“Sometimes I hear it talking. The light of the sunflower was one language, but there are others more audible. Once, in the redwood forest, I heard a beat, something like a drum or heart coming from. the ground and trees and wind. That underground current stirred a kind of knowing inside me, a kinship and longing, a dream barely remembered that disappeared back to the body. Another time, there was the booming voice of an ocean storm thundering from far out at sea, telling about what lived in the distance, about the rough water that would arrive, wave after wave revealing the disturbance at center.

Tonight I walk. I am watching the sky. I think of the people who came before me and how they knew the placement of stars in the sky, watched the moving sun long and hard enough to witness how a certain angle of light touched a stone only once a year. Without written records, they knew the gods of every night, the small, fine details of the world around them and of immensity above them.

Walking, I can almost hear the redwoods beating. And the oceans are above me here, rolling clouds, heavy and dark, considering snow. On the dry, red road, I pass the place of the sunflower, that dark and secret location where creation took place. I wonder if it will return this summer, if it will multiply and move up to the other stand of flowers in a territorial struggle.

It’s winter and there is smoke from the fires. The square, lighted windows of houses are fogging over. It is a world of elemental attention, of all things working together, listening to what speaks in the blood. Whichever road I follow, I walk in the land of many gods, and they love and eat one another. Walking, I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.” —Linda Hogan

Expose yourself to your deepest fear. After that, you are free.” —Jim Morrison

Joseph Campbell: “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure that you seek.”

Sweetness

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Day two of Poem a Day! Prompt (Sweetness) from Robert Lee Brewer at Writers Digest, and art from my own collaboration with Wombo Dream AI.

Birth of a Poem

A poem is not born
until it hits the air,
until you’ve tasted
its sugar on your tongue,
shaped it with your lips,
felt the hiss and slither
as the words meet the soft,
sweet curl of your ears,
those precious shells,
which yearn for music,
which long for golden truth.

Gratitude List for All Souls:
1. Lizzie and Lura and Marian and Mammy
2. Wangari and Rachel
3. Harriet and Sojourner and Dorothy
4. The Witches and Rebels and Heretics
5. Annwyn and Nathan and Merle and Carl
. . .and all those bright spirits gathered around
our remembering hearts.
May we walk in Bright Memory.

“No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member—
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds—
November!”
—Thomas Hood, No!

“I could not be a poet without the natural world. Someone else could. But not me. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple.” —Mary Oliver

“Nourish beginnings, let us nourish beginnings. Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest. The blessing is in the seed.” —Muriel Rukeyser

“We discover the Earth in the depths of our being through participation, not through isolation or exploitation. We are most ourselves when we are most intimate with the rivers and mountains and woodlands, with the sun and the moon and the stars in the heavens… We belong here. Our home is here. The excitement and fulfillment of our lives is here… Just as we are fulfilled in our communion with the larger community to which we belong, so too the universe itself and every being in the universe is fulfilled in us.” —Thomas Berry, The Sacred Universe

Words of Howard Zinn:
“We don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world. Even when we don’t ‘win,’ there is fun and fulfillment in the fact that we have been involved, with other good people, in something worthwhile. We need hope.

“An optimist isn’t necessarily a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the dark of our time. To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something.

“If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”

Bill Maher:
“Christians, I know, I’m sorry; I know you hate this and you want to square this circle, but you can’t. I’m not even judging you. I’m just saying, logically, if you ignore every single thing Jesus commanded you to do, you’re not a Christian. You’re just auditing. You’re not Christ’s followers. You’re just fans.”

“Come, come, whoever you are. Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving. It doesn’t matter. Ours is not a caravan of despair. Come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times. Come, yet again, come, come.” ―Jelaluddin Rumi

Beginnings and Endings

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

It’s November! Time for a Poem a Day! I am following Robert Lee Brewer’s Prompts over at The Writer’s Digest. Today, he suggests a Beginnings/Endings poem (or one or the other). The art is a collaboration between me and the Wombo Dream AI.

Another Month to Feed
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

Perhaps it’s always rabbits
at the mouth of the month
because beginnings come
so often timidly, twitching noses
in the shadows, marking a small
moment in the never-ending
spiral of time, one birth in
an incandescent infinity
of new beginnings, yet
another meal for the wolf
of the month to come.

Gratitude List:
1. Poetry prompts
2. The two children who held my hands in the woods yesterday.
3. Social/emotional learning and teaching
4. Finding fresh purpose
5. Miracles
May we walk, oh so tenderly, in Beauty!

“I am passionate about everything in my life, first and foremost, passionate about ideas. And that’s a dangerous person to be in this society, not just because I’m a woman, but because it’s such a fundamentally anti-intellectual, anti-critical thinking society.” —bell hooks

“Bless the light and the darkness, the love and the fear.” —Rabbi Olivier BenHaim

“It doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like, so long as somebody loves you.” —Roald Dahl, The Witches

“For women who are tied to the moon, love alone is not enough. We insist each day wrap its knuckles through our heart strings and pull. The lows, the joy, the poetry. We dance at the edge of a cliff. You have fallen off. So it goes. You will climb up again.” —Anais Nin

“The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

“In the morning I went out to pick dandelions and was drawn to the Echinacea patch where I found a honeybee clinging to one of the pink flowers. She seemed in distress, confused and weak. She kept falling off the flower and then catching herself in midair and flying dizzily back. She kept trying to get back to work, to collect her pollen and nectar to take home to the hive to make honey but she was getting weaker and weaker and then she fell into my hand. I knew she would never make it back to her hive. For the next half hour she rested in my palm, her life slowly ebbing away as a thunderstorm started to brew. I sat on the earth waiting for death with her. The lightning flashed over the mountains, a family of turkeys slowly walked the ridge, a wild dog keyed into what was happening circled past us. The trees appeared startlingly vivid and conscious as the wind blew up and the thunder cracked and then her death was finished. She was gone forever. But in her going she taught me to take every moment as my last flower, do what I could and make something sweet of it.” —Layne Redmond

“Let me seek, then, the gift of silence, and poverty, and solitude, where everything I touch is turned into prayer: where the sky is my prayer, the birds are my prayer, the wind in the trees is my prayer, for God is all in all.” —Thomas Merton

“Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.” —Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, author of Frankenstein

Audre Lorde:
“For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.
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Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.
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As they become known and accepted to ourselves, our feelings, and the honest exploration of them, become sanctuaries and fortresses and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas, the house of difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action. Right now, I could name at least ten ideas I would have once found intolerable or incomprehensible and frightening, except as they came after dreams and poems. This is not idle fantasy, but the true meaning of “it feels right to me.” We can train ourselves to respect our feelings, and to discipline (transpose) them into a language that matches those feelings so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream or vision, it is the skeleton architecture of our lives.”

“Wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving.” —Khalil Gibran

I Am Only Here to Love

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments
Kite-flying as a metaphor for parenting.

Today, I gave my self the task of writing an Eavesdrop poem. Like many found poems, it can become more about the word play and the intellectual game than about the artfulness. Occasionally, I find I’m creating one that really rings. I’m not sure today’s quite meets the artful edge, but I have grading to finish, and I think I’ll call it done here. I’ll post my prompt page and the “harvest page” where I wrote the random eaves drops, and then the poem.

Gratitude List:
1. Leading singing with the Children. As I was leading the first song this morning, I noticed that three or four of the young children were actually waving their arms around along with me, so when I led “I See a New World Coming,” I asked the young song leaders to come up on stage and lead with me, and about ten kids joined me, and it might have been the most fun I have ever had leading singing.
2. Kite-flying with the whole family. Henry asked my dad to pull out the kites after lunch, and it was a blast (though I ended up going inside because I was cold).
3. Lunch and the afternoon with a lot of the family. It’s such a relief to spend time together again.
4. There are lights at ends of tunnels. Though I don’t see mine yet in the work of the rest of the day, I know it too will come.
5. Communities of people committed to the work of loving, of healing, of growing and evolving human compassion and empathy, of listening, of learning together. My friends, my family, my colleagues, my church, my online circles. You, Beloveds, you!
May we walk, always, in Beauty!

“Sound or vibration is the most powerful force in the universe. Music is a divine art, to be used not only for pleasure but as a path to Awakening.” —Yogananda

“As above, so below, as within, so without, as the universe, so the soul.” —Hermes Trismegistus

“The greatest danger to our future is apathy.” —Jane Goodall

“Did I offer peace today? Did I bring a smile to someone’s face? Did I say words of healing? Did I let go of my anger and resentment? Did I forgive? Did I love? These are the real questions. I must trust that the little bit of love that I sow now will bear many fruits, here in this world and the life to come.” —Henri Nouwen

“In the end, we’ll all become stories.” —Margaret Atwood

“Privilege is when you think something’s not a problem because it’s not a problem to you personally.” —attributed to many authors

Dea Ex Machina
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

What we speak
we create.
Writing,
we make meaning
into existence.

These words, cogs
and gears, shift
meaning to matter:

“Let there be. . .”
And there is.

And it is good.

Make space in this house
for all of the people you are.
Make room for the schemer,
the doubter, the cynic,
but open some space
for the credulous child
and the mystic, the dreamer,
the wild one, the quiet one.

Open a space within
for the glass-half-full to dance
with the glass-half-empty,
for the monk to sing songs
of revolution with the fury.

There in those rooms,
the One may enter
and speak your many names,
saying, Peace be yours.
—Beth Weaver-Kreider

A New Year Dawns

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Here are two versions of the same photo, taken as the sky was beginning to show grey on this first morning of a new year. In the first, I played with filters and textures and color saturation in order to create a pensive mood. Looking at it here in this space, it feels anxious and wary and stark, especially next to the second version, which I ran through an AI Dream filter. This second one is still pensive, but cheerier, more hopeful.

While both are significantly changed from the original, both of them hold emotional truth that is deeper than the just-the-facts original. I AM going pensively into this new year. I am both rattled and happy, scratched and hopeful. The shadows are there, but they don’t scare me (not so much, anyway), and I am ready to explore them a little more deeply.

Usually I wait until Epiphany to declare my words to myself, but I am feeling settled now, ready to choose, ready to embark.

So, my word for this year is Embodiment. I have written about this idea before, the way I have always felt a deep sense of wrongness whenever religious and spiritual and self-help practices begin to talk about mind over matter, or about transcending the body, or about liberating the soul from its body trap. I understand at a base level the philosophical concept that this physical reality isn’t the Real Reality, but I don’t really accept it as a core principle. Or, as I understand it, I think I need to understand it through the physical body I live in.

I think it’s helpful to consider body, mind, and spirit, to see to all our various categories of health and wellbeing, but I always feel like the greatest health happens when I am working to integrate all the various aspects of myself rather than separating them out, dividing in order to conquer, particularly in the way the culture I live in seems to see the punishment of the body as a virtue, unless it fits some strange “idealized” vision of what a body should be.

I am soul embodied into matter. I think perhaps, yes, the soul part of me exists in a way that may transcend this physical plane. I get glimpses of that. But this collection of atoms that make up the physical part of me are no less ME than the sentient, thinking, yearning, indwelling part. And if my soul exists here in this present plane, then I believe it’s here for a purpose, to know what it feels like to touch and taste and see and hear and smell, to experience physical pain and pleasure, to be em-bodied.

Body imbued with soul, with spirit, with sentience. Soul enmattered. Mind ensouled. These different pieces of what we come to know of as Self are in this current configuration because they teach and inform each other. I think we hinder our evolution by trying to escape and transcend the magic of this intertwinement. Or, to take the positive twist, we further human evolution and our own personal destiny and purpose by becoming integrated selves, all the pieces braided together.

Two streams that I have been working with this year that relate to Embodiment are Creativity and Magick, so those are also words for my coming year. If I am categorizing the various parts of me, perhaps Creativity fits in the more mental realm, the ways in which the mind solves problems and develops new ideas. And Magick is the more spiritual, the prayerful, the awareness of deeper levels of reality, the level of the soul. So my quest for the year is how to braid my creative and spiritual selves more artfully into my physical reality.

Some implications:
* I will continue this journey to consciously stop beating up on my body for the way she looks or feels. I will offer her what she needs and tend to her aches and changes.
* I will live through this period of peri-menopause with as much consciousness and intention as possible.
* I will feed the creative and spiritual parts of mySelf as intentionally as I feed my physical Self. With care and with joy. For health and for satisfaction.

Last week, I posted a quote by bell hooks on Facebook, about how self-improvement when done as a simply inward-looking thing can become narcissistic, that we only become better in the context of community. A friend expanded this, pointing out the paradox that we cannot improve our communities unless we do our inner work. Both/And.

Perhaps that’s part of why I have this urge to keep this blog-journal public, to lay at least some of it bare so that I can place my own journey into the community context. It’s why, even while I recognize that aspects of my social media life have become addictive and need reigning in, the overall open and vulnerable quality of the community I have discovered on social media keeps me learning and growing from the inner journeys of so many circles of beloveds. We become better together.

Gratitude List:
1. Being a multi-faceted being: soul and mind and body and spirit and streams of energy braided into one Self.
2. Evolving, growing, changing, Becoming
3. Cats
4. Reflections: windows, mirrors, shadows. . .
5. Layers: in artwork, leaves, selves, reflections, clothing. . .
May we walk in Wisdom!

Honoring Kwanzaa with those who celebrate it: The word for this last day of Kwanzaa is Imani, or Faith. Believe that your dreams have the power to create change in the world. May it be so for you and for me and for all who long for and work for justice in the coming year.

May the long time sun shine upon you
All love surround you
And the pure light within you
Guide your way on.
—Traditional Irish Blessing

“A writer without readers is just a person alone in a room.” —Barbara Kingsolver

Someone Should Start Laughing
by Hafiz (Ladinsky)

I have a thousand brilliant lies
For the question:
How are you?
I have a thousand brilliant lies
For the question:
What is God?
If you think that the Truth can be known
From words,
If you think that the Sun and the Ocean
Can pass through that tiny opening Called the mouth,
O someone should start laughing!
Someone should start wildly Laughing –Now!

“Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Courage, Dear Heart.” —the Albatross (Aslan) to Lucy, C. S. Lewis

“And now we welcome the new year. Full of things that have never been.” —Rainer Maria Rilke

“Hope smiles from the threshold of the year to come,
Whispering ‘it will be happier.’” —Alfred Tennyson

“Darkness deserves gratitude. It is the alleluia point at which we learn to understand that all growth does not take place in the sunlight.” ―Joan Chittister

“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning.” —T. S. Eliot

“And we are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love.”
—William Blake

“I want to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.”
―Mary Oliver

NPM Day 3: Rhyme Play!

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For National Poetry Month, some of my poetry shelves.

Poetry Prompt for Day Three of National Poetry Month–

Rhyme Play!
Why do we assume that the rhyme has to happen at the ends of lines? Write a poem (maybe four lines, or eight, or twelve) in which the first words of the lines rhyme, instead of the last. Or make the middle word in each line rhyme. Make ALL the words rhyme? Make the first word of each line rhyme with the last word of the previous line—essentially, you’re sticking your two rhyming words together, separated only by the line break. Give yourself an extra challenge and make the first word and last word of the poem rhyme, and you’ll make it a complete circle.

What does that do to the poem when you switch up the rhyme? How does it affect the tone and the energy and the way the line moves from beginning to end?

Here’s an attempt at the last one:
When I think of how you’ve loved me,
see the thread of your tender care,
there in my self-absorbed cocoon,
crooning myself a lullaby,
I wish I had a poem to give you
to tell you how you’ve saved my heart again.

Gratitude List:
1. The fine distinctions of flavor, and the joy of concentrating on scent and flavor
2. Brown creeper sidling up the little oak
3. Delicious supper last night: Thank you, Val! I can now distinguish mocha
4. Succulents. I repotted some of my classroom succulents yesterday. I think they grew happily because I was gone for so long and didn’t overwater them
5. Spring birdsong

May we walk in Beauty!

“Sound or vibration is the most powerful force in the universe. Music is a divine art, to be used not only for pleasure but as a path to Awakening.” —Yogananda

“As above, so below, as within, so without, as the universe, so the soul.” —Hermes Trismegistus

“The greatest danger to our future is apathy.” —Jane Goodall

“Did I offer peace today? Did I bring a smile to someone’s face? Did I say words of healing? Did I let go of my anger and resentment? Did I forgive? Did I love? These are the real questions. I must trust that the little bit of love that I sow now will bear many fruits, here in this world and the life to come.” —Henri Nouwen

“In the end, we’ll all become stories.” —Margaret Atwood

“Privilege is when you think something’s not a problem because it’s not a problem to you personally.” —attributed to many authors

“If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.” —Shirley Chisholm

NPM Day 2: Acrostic

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment
I made this bulletin Board this week. As people write poems on leaves, I will staple them on, and we’ll watch the tree leaf out. I might have to make some apples to add.

(NPM=National Poetry Month)
Write an Acrostic Poem
Choose a word—your name, your favorite word, your password (just kidding!), the name of your town, April—and begin each line of your poem with the letters of the word.

For example:
Please understand:
Once upon a time,
Everything hurt
My feelings.

Write one word per line, or make long and rambling prosy lines. Make it rhyme or eschew rhyme.
Acrostics can be addictive. You probably can’t stop with just one.

This one’s more prosey, perhaps, than poetic, but it’s part of my ongoing chronicle:

Obviously, you can
Live without this one,
Fairly easily. When they
Ask, “Which sense
Could you not bear
To lose?” no one speaks
Of smell. But every day, I
Rest my face in roses, hoping.
Yes, today, the tiniest whiff.

Gratitude List:
1. Succulents. It’s not true that you can’t kill them–I have–but they make such pleasant companions
2. The red leaf-buds on the trees against that blue true dream of sky (eec)
3. My sense of smell is beginning–slowly–to return
4. For all its flaws, The Lord of the Rings. We watched The Fellowship again last night, and it is such a marvelous story to drop into.
5. A long weekend. I’ll say it again: A long weekend!

May we walk in Beauty!

“What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.” —Alain de Botton

“We are capable of suffering with our world, and that is the true meaning of compassion. It enables us to recognize our profound interconnectedness with all beings. Don’t ever apologize for crying for the trees burning in the Amazon or over the waters polluted from mines in the Rockies. Don’t apologize for the sorrow, grief, and rage you feel. It is a measure of your humanity and your maturity. It is a measure of your open heart, and as your heart breaks open there will be room for the world to heal.” —Joanna Macy

“We should have respect for animals because it makes better human beings of us all.” —Jane Goodall

“Let yourself be silently drawn
by the strange pull of what you love.
It will not lead you astray.” —Rumi

“If you hear the dogs, keep going. If you see the torches in the woods, keep going. If there’s shouting after you, keep going. Don’t ever stop. Keep going. If you want a taste of freedom, keep going.” —Harriet Tubman

“The little grassroots people can change this world.” —Wangari Maathai

“Some form of the prayer of quiet is necessary to touch me at the unconscious level, the level where deep and lasting transformation occurs. From my place of prayer, I am able to understand more clearly what is mine to do and have the courage to do it. Unitive consciousness—the awareness that we are all one in Love—lays a solid foundation for social critique and acts of justice.” —Richard Rohr

“You don’t have to attend every argument you’re invited to.” —Anonymous

Shapeshifting and Foolery

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

April POETRY PROMPTS:
Day One–

The Fool, of course!
Today is about shapeshifting, foolery, jesting.

Write a three-line poem (call it haiku, if you need to) that seems like one thing in the first two lines, but shifts to something else in the third line. Bring in a surprise.

Maybe March goes out like a lamb, and the third line brings the lion roaring in.
Maybe you step in the door of the first lines only to step out the door in the third.
Maybe you show your masked self in the first two lines and take off the mask (metaphorically, of course) in the third.

You don’t have to go for a big surprise. It can be a dawning, a quiet wave of change, a whisper, the unfurling of a leaf in the wasteland.

Here’s one I wrote a couple weeks ago:

feathers by the trail
cardinal takes flight
in the belly of the hawk

Gratitude List:
1. Blue carpet of Speedwell
2. Purple carpet of Deadnettle
3. Green carpets of Chickweed and other spring friends
4. Feeling better every day
5. A long weekend to recover in

May we walk in Beauty!

“The fullness of joy is to behold God in everything.” —Julian of Norwich

“Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.” —Carl Jung

“The historical Jesus probably looked like an average Syrian refugee. You know…the ones we turn away.” —Rebecca James Hecking

“Poems are maps to the place where you already are.”
—Jane Hirshfield

“Be still, and the world is bound to turn herself inside out to entertain you. Everywhere you look, joyful noise is clanging to drown out quiet desperation. The choice is to draw the blinds and shut it all out, or believe.” —Barbara Kingsolver, High Tide in Tucson

“When you do not know you need mercy and forgiveness yourself, you invariably become stingy in sharing it with others. So make sure you are always waiting with hands widely cupped under the waterfall of mercy.” —Richard Rohr

“All four gospels insist that when all the other disciples are fleeing, Mary Magdalene does not run. She stands firm. She does not betray or lie about her commitment to Jesus—she witnesses. Hers is clearly a demonstration of either the deepest human love or the highest spiritual understanding of what Jesus was teaching—perhaps both. But why—one wonders–do Holy Week liturgies tell and re-tell the story of Peter’s threefold denial of Jesus, while the steady and unwavering witness of Magdalene is passed over—not even noticed? How would our understanding of the paschal story change if instead of reflecting upon Jesus dying alone and rejected if we were to reinforce the fact that one person stood by him and did not leave? For this story of Mary Magdalene is as firmly stated in scripture as the denial story. How would this change the emotional timbre of the day? How would it affect our feeling of ourselves? How would it reflect upon how we have viewed, and still view, women in the church? About the nature of redemptive love?” —Cynthia Bourgeault, Episcopal Priest

“When I feel this fog rolling in on me, I light fires of affection in the hearts of others. I tell them in tangible ways how the life they live makes me live mine differently, how precious and important they are to the rest of us. That fire then becomes like a beacon which burns through the grey and which I can sail towards.” –Toko-pa Turner

It’s good to leave each day behind,
like flowing water, free of sadness.
Yesterday is gone and its tale told.
Today new seeds are growing.
—Rumi