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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

Paths Crossing

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

Last Sunday morning, two rabbits hopped companionably from northeast to southwest, and someone else trotted sort of purposefully from north to south. Probably this happened at significantly different times. Cat or fox seems to have been unaware of its potential prey-folk going the other direction.

This morning, a week later, most of the snow is gone. The sun is bright in the blue sky, and a murder has just passed through the hollow, a massive flock of crows, barking and yapping, making the very air tingle with their passing. I stood in the yard and watched them. I could swear one of them vocalized “Hello” from the lower limbs of the dying chestnut. In four or five of the trees in the lower part of the hollow, sentries had placed themselves, repeating five or six short quick yaps in a row, in succession: walnut tree sentry, then maple tree sentry, then locust tree, and so on. Changes are on the wing. Fly brightly, Wildfolk.

Gratitude List:
1. Thoughtful conversations with young people on topics of social media and race and personal accountability.
2. My school’s Lunar New Year celebrations.
3. Hundreds of crows flying through the hollow.
4. This sore throat doesn’t seem to be more than a little part of a cold (knock on wood). When I take a cough drop or drink tea, it feels so much better.
5. All the people working for a better world.

May we walk in Beauty!

“Whether through prayer, ritual, poetry, or song, gratitude solidifies our relationship with the living mystery. It rejoins us to the intangible wholeness from which we feel disconnected. As we remember ourselves to the holy in nature, we are forging our own belonging.” —Toko-pa Turner

“If you want to do the work of God, pay attention to people. Notice them. . .especially the people nobody else notices.” —John Ortberg

“There is no reality but Oneness. Open into that.” —Bahauddin

“Take a deep breath. Find the place inside you that remembers how truth feels; remember that there are kinds of anger that are more effective than blind outrage.” —Beth Weaver-Kreider (to remind myself)

Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Remember: truth and justice ultimately always win.

“The goal of any true resistance is to affect outcomes, not just to vent. And the only way to affect outcomes and thrive in our lives, is to find the eye in the hurricane, and act from that place of inner strength.” —Arianna Huffington

“She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.” —All of us, now, continuing to take the words away from that senator

All My Relations

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment


If I’m not mistaken, a yellow-bellied sapsucker has been visiting my willow.

Today’s prompt is to write a relationship poem.

Even the stinkbug
that you lift so gingerly
from the wall
and scoop out the window
into the night breeze

Even the small mouse
skittering over the counter

Even the forsythia
flashing golden
in the afternoon sun

Even the curve
of the cobalt bowl
which nestles
into your palms

Even the Mayapples
in the woodsedge

Even the geese on the pond
Even the fish
Even the spider
whose art is everywhere

Even the mantis
who looks you in the eye,
who are so much larger
but so much less fierce

Even the hawk
circling over the field
Even the wind in the branches
Even the groundhog
eating your spinach

All is at one with you
All is family
If you cannot say to the rabbit,
I am your sister. I am your brother.
If you cannot say to the sun,
I recognize you as one of my family,

If you cannot say to the oxygen
as it races into your lungs,
We are children together
in this great race of living,

Then you will always be
separate, isolated, alone.

Gratitude List:
1. The fire and energy of the young actors, singers, dancers of my school. They had a fantastic show tonight. All the pieces were good, but the one that will stick with me is the song, “You Will Be Found.”
2. A shining blue bluebird
3. An indigo sky, just before total dark
4. Green. Have I mentioned the green? I was beginning to feel like my soul could not breathe, but everything is finally going green, and I can breathe again.
5. The deep purple violets all over my yard.

May we walk in Beauty!

Finding Your Sacred Song

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

I looked up mockingbird in Ted Andrews’ Animal Speak.  He says the keynote of the mockingbird is “Finding your sacred song.”  In these days when the mockingbirds are singing from treetops in every hollow and on every hilltop, I wish you that finding.  May your song rise clear into the air.

Gratitude List:
1.  Deer and lion and rabbit and Suzy.  Messages of compassion and courage and listening.
2.  We managed to catch Pepita without too much trouble after she ran across the street and under the grumpy neighbor’s forsythia bush.  And we have a sort of funny story out of it.
3.  I feel so good about what I accomplished today, all that mowing and making supper (Shepherd’s Pie) and spending time with a friend–and the children didn’t melt down and fall apart in the meantime.
4.  The way swallows climb the sky.  How they beat their wings against the wind and rise up it.
5.  Forgiveness.

May we walk in Beauty.