Poetry

Grandmother’s Roots

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

IMG_20160530_110821693
the peonies have
finally awakened in
the doorway of June
transient blooms and roots that
come from grandmother’s garden

Examen and Gratitude:
1. (Who inspires you?) Harriet Tubman.  Today, I finish my mini-course with my students at the River.  We will talk of dreams and water, of the Underground Railroad that traveled up this River, the walk to freedom.  And I will tell them of the Dreamer, Harriet Tubman–legend says that sometimes she would suddenly fall asleep at really dangerous moments on the journey northward, but when she awoke, she would know the next way to go.
2. (What makes you glad?) Sun on the wing of the red-winged blackbird.
3. (What fills you with deep joy?) The inclusive laughter of teenagers, the way they perform for each other to make each other laugh, the way the laughter catches from one to another and on down the line like a wildfire.
4. (What is your hunger?) For solitude, for silence, for deep quiet.  Even in the midst of loving these last days with my young people, part of me is turning toward the quiet of summer and the deliberate pacing of the long days.
5. (What wakes you up and calls you forward?) Trying on new ways to use words, reading poets who break up language and use it like mosaic and collage artists use broken bits of glass and pieces of paper.

May we walk in Beauty!

Day of Gratitude

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

veggies
Looking forward to summer.

The Lancaster Mennonite School system has declared today to be a day of gratitude.  One of our areas of focus is on all the many people throughout the years who have helped to create what we have as a school, from the people who clean the halls and bathrooms to the people who have donated money for science equipment and buildings to the administrative staff and the students and parents and the teachers and kitchen crew and the volunteers who keep things running smoothly.  It’s a huge list, and I want to keep adding and adding to it..  Talk about a complex web of people working together to create something they believe in!

I have been asked to present the chapel service for the middle school this morning–to talk about gratitude.  I am going to finish up by giving them some basic “guidelines” for writing gratitude lists.  I feel like I am taking you–everyone who reads my lists–along with me.

Here’s my poem for today.  One of our model poems for writing was Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Recuerdo” (I didn’t want them just to think of the heaviness of “Conscientious Objector” when they hear her name).  We tried writing stanzas about a memory, with four-ish beats and AABBCC rhymes like “Recuerdo.”  I only managed one stanza, and then I felt the poem was complete.

You raced up the hill, and leaped into the sky,
swinging higher than the rooftop of the house, and I
caught my breath, watching as you flew
between the earth and heaven.  I marveled how you
had no sense of danger, no fear of falling,
just reckless abandon and the wild wind calling.

Gratitude List:
1. My school.  Just like they say the church is not the building but the people inside it, the school is also the living and working people who make it happen.
2. Gratitude Day–Just like setting aside a few moments in the morning to reflect on what I am grateful for, setting aside a day for reflection as a community becomes a group spiritual discipline.
3. Poetry.  I love being able to teach Creative Writing, where the work is word-play.
4. Academia.  I am incredibly grateful that I found my way back into the world of learning and teaching.  I am listening to “The Canterbury Tales” on my daily ride, and I got a little thrill when we came to the part in the prologue where he was describing the clerk.  Some old college memory surfaced a couple lines ahead of time, so that I could say along with the reader, “And gladly would he learn, and gladly teach.”  In the back of my head, I could hear Jay Landis, one of my college English professors, saying it along with us.
5. Birdsong.  In this part of the year, I am writing these lists just as day is dawning, and the wing-folk are starting to tune up.  I love that their “Get-out-of-my-space-buster!” sounds to us like “Glory, glory!”

May we walk in Beauty!

Setting the Story Free

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

Poet-Tree
This is the April Poetry Month Poet-Tree from 2014.  It took quite a bit of maintenance, even when I did not have a full-time job, so I haven’t done it for a couple years, but I think of it every year.

I am pulling words out of a paragraph I wrote a couple years ago, and beginning my poem with them.  This, then, becomes a poem about a poem.  I am not brooding so intensely today as I was when I wrote these words the first time.

Here are the words,
tossed out of my brooding heart,
flung out of this boat of me.
Perhaps I’ll breathe more freely
if I can set this story free.

The poem may begin to bend those bars,
make the space for breathing,
find that one breach in the ceiling
that lets the sky coming rushing in.

Catch the flotsam if you can,
salvage whatever floats to you on the waters.
Craft an altar, build a temple,
delineate the space to walk a labyrinth.
Shape the bones of the poem
to the space that suits your need.
Cry or bleed, worship or wait,
and send the remnants onward
for another stranded spirit.

Gratitude List:
1. Yesterday morning’s wonderful music
2. Interfaith dialogue.  All we can learn from each other.
3. The sane and reasonable voices
4. Contemplative poets: Rumi and Hafiz, O’Donohue and White, Oliver and Harjo and Levertov
5. The web, the basket, the bowl–images and symbols

May we walk in Beauty!

Throw Open the Windows

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

candle

If you wish to find rest here below and hereafter, in all circumstances say, “Who am I?” and do not judge anyone. –Abba Joseph to Abba Poemen

Rattle the bars,
turn the screws loose,
throw off a limitation or two
like veils and garments cast to the wind.
Open the windows and doors,
welcome the wild wind,
escape the cage.

Gratitude List:
1. Synchronicity.  When you begin to look for it, you see it everywhere.
2. Advent.  Something new is coming.
3. Weekends.  Time to rest.
4. Solstice.  Soon, soon, soon the sun returns.
5. Poetry in the hands and brains and hearts of ninth graders.  Brilliant.

May our hearts, our hands, our minds be open to what the day brings.

Music and Story

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wordcloud

Gratitude List:
1. More wonderful student music last night at my school–everything from fiery Vivaldi violins to Christmas pieces to a gentle jazzy rendition of Amy Winehouse’s “Valerie.”  I went with my boy, who plays cello and trombone.  He, of course, had to sit right behind the sound booth, so he could watch that action.
2. Mercy.  From the Old Etruscan for “exchange.”  Cynthia Bourgeault speaks of “inter-abiding” with the Divine.  Mercy.
3. Poetry Unit with the 9th Graders.  When I announced that we are starting poetry in my three English 9 classes, I only heard one groan (and that from the obligatory groaner–there’s one in every crowd–I could say, “Hey Gang, time for candy!” and this one would groan).  They left class chatting about the poems they were going to write.  Aaaaah.
4.  The intersection of this world and the real world.  Yesterday when I was dropping off some Scholastic forms at the library, I ran into a friend from online, someone I have only met in person three or four times, but whose heart is dear to me.
5. Story.  Narrative. Literature. The way people’s hearts gather ’round, as at a campfire, when someone says, “Let me tell you a story.”

May we walk in Beauty!

What Does it Matter?

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Just a few more days!  I love the challenge of these months, and I am so glad to get the break when they are done.  Today’s prompt is to write a matter/anti-matter poem.  I just let this one run its little free-association course.

Aunty Matter strides into Grandma’s kitchen
in her black stockings with holes in the heels
and a long black velvet dress
with fine lace insets.

She pirouettes.

“What does it matter, Mater,
if I should wander once in a while?
The fact of the matter is:
I’m green only for a day
before my dreams are heaped
in that pile of rubble in the orchard.”

It’s just a matter of time, perhaps
until she’s gone down the anticline,
until she’s reached the event horizon,
the point of no returning.

Still, the young ones are donning
black stockings of our own
to follow her in her dance
as though the dance is all that matters.

 

Gratitude List:
1. People working for Justice
2. People willing to engage the hard conversations
3. People with hope in their hearts
4. People who sing even when it’s dark
5. People whose M.O. is Love

May we walk in Beauty!

Awash

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today’s prompt is to write an across the sea poem.  Here’s a haiku:

Alas!  I’m awash
in this sea of a season.
I’ll drown in that green.

Gratitude List:
1. Ferns unfurling
2. YWCA and its anti-racism work.  I was proud to support it by joining the Race today.
3. Shakespeare.  I am awash in his poetry.
4. The way the streetlight turned the new leaves on those trees by the Rutt building to a fairy golden.
5. Reading books with the kids in the new fort that Jon built out by the United Melvin Hall.

May we walk in Beauty!

Not What it Seems

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today’s prompt is to write a things-not-as-they-appear poem.  I keep going back to the Shaman Poem from March 1:

Here is how we make the world:
I will say fire and mean wisdom.
I will say wisteria and mean my thoughts are tangled.
I will say the river is flowing and mean that time is passing.
I will say grandmother’s quilt and mean that the work is love.

I will say house and mean your heart.
I will say spiderweb and mean the prayers are holding you.
I will say the eagle flies and mean my thoughts are with you.
I will say the daffodils are blooming and mean you are healing.

I will say song and mean dream.
I will say dream and mean prayer.
I will say prayer and mean poem.

 

Gratitude List:
1. My neighbor’s bank of nodding sunny daffodils.  (Say Man-who-Plants-Sunshine, and no longer mean Crusty Curmudgeon.  That one is going to take some work.)
2. Freckles on a small boy’s face.
3. A day to organize and tidy the classroom.
4. Playing outside!
5. All the poems of April.  I decided I did not have time curate a Poetree this year.  Still, the Internet is a grand Tree of Poetry.  I am loving reading everyone’s poems.

May we walk in Beauty!

A Poem Should Be

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

DSCN7423

After my long post the other day about meaning in poetry, I keep hearing Archibald MacLeish’s line in my head: “A poem should not mean but be.”

And Grace Paley’s “Responsibility.”

I am in the midst of trying to bring to birth a poem that I think might be titled “The Shaman’s Lexicon.”  Perhaps I need to write my own “Ars Poetica,” my own “Responsibility.” Getting caught up in the whirlwind of a compelling poetic idea reminds me again that despite the thought-provoking analysis of even the most careful critics, when it comes down to it, writing poetry is an art, and that like a visual artist, a poet is often following the trail of an obsessive idea.  The process is less about seeking meaning, perhaps, and more about relieving the curiosity of what lies beyond the next turning.

Gratitude List:
1. A Christmas Carol. Joss discovered Grandma Kreider’s unabridged copy with gorgeous illustrations and asked Jon to read it to him.  They spent hours with it, Jon explaining some of the denser bits and skipping some of the longer bits of of description, and finally made it through. Joss was engrossed.  I’ll admit to openly weeping when the Spirit of Christmas Future showed Scrooge the Cratchit house after the death of Tiny Tim.  I hope we can make that a tradition.  Now I am going to try to finish The Best Christmas Pageant Ever with them today.
2. Dawn in the hollow, sun shining on frost.  The chickens used to get me up and out to see it every day.  Now, most days, I am on the road before the dawn spreads her rosy fingers over the sky, and I have bequeathed the chickens to friend who will be a less distracted caretaker.  So I am grateful this morning for the wee sleekit mousie who needed repatriation in the upper fields.
3. Advice Rebound: I told a friend the other day, in that advice-giving tone that I can’t seem to make myself stop using: “You need to take a break, carve out time just for yourself.” I could feel those words bouncing back on me as I said them.
4. Dreams.  I am gleaning my dreams for the messages of the year, here in the bowl of Twelvenight.
5. The murmurings and mutterings of the children playing together in the background.

May we walk in Beauty!

I Will Get to You

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

On paging through Shaking the Pumpkin: Traditional Poetry of the Indian North Americans:

I had to put the book down
and walk away,
the fire of it still running
up and down my spine

lest I fall into the pit of poetry
and lose myself there for the day,
for the year,
lose my family,
time,
direction.

Even this,
these black marks on the page,
these birds’ feet in the snow,
quiver on my skin
like coals.

***

Perhaps it’s the result of going so suddenly from teaching to resting, but now my brain is filling up with images and ideas, like a room crowded with children all clamoring for my attention.  Ah!  There’s the image: sometimes when class begins, I suddenly find myself in the center of a crowd of earnest and intent students all needing something from me–a pass, a signature, an explanation, a bit of comfort–and I cannot meet every need at once, but I want to look everyone in the eye and say, “I’ll get to you,” knowing that I haven’t the time or the energy to entirely fulfill the needs they carry.  Today, I opened that book, and suddenly the new poems and writing ideas that I have been putting off for so many weeks now have come crowding about me, begging for passes and signatures and permission to go get a drink.  Were I single and childless, I would make this a day of delicious writing, but I’ll need to put these voices off for just a little while yet.  I’ll get to you, Bright Ones.  I promise I will do my best.

 

Gratitude List:
1. The dimple in Ellis’s chin.  Where did that come from?  I don’t think that the Weaver or the Kreiders have chin-dimples.  Do they?  And why is it so endearing?
2. The poetry of Mara Eve Robbins, which fills me with delight and sadness, tears me up and heals me, whichever I need at the moment–her words always seem to come at just the right time, to be just the right thing.
3.  The writing of Barbara Kingsolver.  Why do I always take so long to get started on her books?  She writes with equal power of both internal and external landscapes.  I am listening to Flight Behavior these days, and all around me now I hear the whispers of butterfly wings.
4. The best Christmas ever.  That’s what the boys keep saying, and who am I to disagree?
5.  Dreams.  Listening.

May we walk in Beauty!