raven

Redux

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 4 Comments

There was a little game going around Facebook recently in which you determine the name of your craft beer by using your grandfather’s profession and a word that you don’t quite understand. I think mine might be Harnessmaker’s Redux. I know redux means remix or retry or rework, sort of, but it always feels like there’s some edgy mystery meaning in there. Today’s prompt is to remix a poem from earlier in the month. I’ve rewritten my poem about wooing the muse. I think I may prefer the original, but this month is about the way the daily deadlines push me to play with words and sounds in new ways. If I don’t get any “good” poems out of this month, I have already expanded my voice, pushed myself out of some ruts. But I really hope I can glean at least one or two good ones from November’s hoard.

how to woo the muse

woo her with muchness
or nothing at all
woo her with wise
nonsensical prattle
with the way sound crashes
upon sound upon sound
upon sound upon sound
ringing from line to line
singing a fine tune
say her name often, say
i would have written, but my muse. . .
say, the muse is a harsh moon
a mysterious mistress, sing odes
to the moon but mean muse
pretend not to care
write a masterpiece
of utter garbage
pretend not to care
but as they say the best way
is simply to put your butt
in the chair

Gratitude List:
1. Commiseration
2. I am pretty sure that was Raven rowing through the sky above me on my way to Hershey this morning
3. Today’s Literacy Conference in Hershey–lots of great ideas to enliven my teaching
4. My colleagues
5. Free books! So many books!
May we walk in Beauty!

“Never laugh at live dragons.” —J.R.R. Tolkien

“Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.” —Aristotle

“In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.” —Mark Twain

“Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.” —Aristotle

“The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.” —Anais Nin

“Changing the big picture takes time.. and the best thing to do is focus on the things that we can make in our lives if we’re doing all that. That becomes the collage of real change.” —Michelle Obama

“Adventure is worthwhile in itself.” —Amelia Earhart

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” —Lucille Ball

“Learn how to take criticism seriously but not personally.” —Hillary Clinton

“Like a great starving beast, my body is quivering, fixed on the scent of light.” —Hafiz

“Identity is a story carried in the body.” —Sophia Samatar

“Once every people in the world believed that trees were divine … and that deer, and ravens and foxes, and wolves and bears, and clouds and pools, almost all things under the sun and moon, and the sun and moon, were not less divine …”
—W.B. Yeats

“The heart is your student, for love is the only way we learn.”
—Rumi

Poet Joy Harjo, from 2012:
“Visited with my cousin George Coser, Jr yesterday at the kitchen table. He’s a gift. Always something profound among the stories. The sacred lies at the root of the mundane. And every word is a power element. Each word or sound, whether thought, written or spoken grows our path, the path of our generation, the children, grandchildren, the Earth. . . . We become the ancestors. A sense of play gives a lightness of being. So get out there and play—and be kind while you’re at it. To yourself, too.”

Help me to journey beyond the familiar
and into the unknown.
Give me the faith to leave old ways
and break fresh ground with You.

Christ of the mysteries, I trust You
to be stronger than each storm within me.
I will trust in the darkness and know
that my times, even now, are in Your hand.
Tune my spirit to the music of heaven,
and somehow, make my obedience count for You.
—The Prayer of St. Brendan (attributed to Brendan)

The Wild Geese
by Wendell Berry

Horseback on Sunday morning,
harvest over, we taste persimmon
and wild grape, sharp sweet
of summer’s end. In time’s maze
over fall fields, we name names
that went west from here, names
that rest on graves. We open
a persimmon seed to find the tree
that stands in promise,
pale, in the seed’s marrow.
Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear,
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye
clear. What we need is here.

After Strand

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

Here is a poem, written after Mark Strand’s “From a Litany”:

Here in the hush before morning,
I praise the coming dawn which will push back the curtain of night.
I praise the secret shadows in the bamboo.
I praise the first brave bird to sing.
I praise the soft sighs of the cat curled beside the vents.
I praise the tang of pine entering my body through breath.
I praise the clatter of rain.
I praise the fortitude of the early-riser, driving up the hill to work.
I praise the quiet earthworms, deep in the hollows of warm earth below.
I praise the way words tumble from mouth and pen and keyboard.
I praise the thunder of words, their flood and their tempest.
I praise the silent words whispered at midnight,
I praise the tattered remnant of dreams that hover about me like a halo.
I praise the storm of the day as it approaches,
with all its wildness and adventure.

Gratitude List:
1.  Heat!  A new furnace came yesterday, earlier than projected, and we are warm again. This new one sounds different, and the house has a new winter voice.
2.  The deep, secret green of the ferns by Cabin Creek, after everything else has turned brittle and brown, this green holds on.
3.  That verse in Brian Wren’s song “Joyful is the Dark”:

Joyful is the dark Spirit of the deep,
winging wildly o’er the world’s creation,
silken sheen of midnight
plumage black and bright,
swooping with the beauty of a raven.

The whole song, actually.  In these last days before sun-return, the darkness begins to feel claustrophobic.  This keeps the darkness broad and wild and open.
4.  Being part of a community that actively practices restorative justice, and discusses it together.  I am constantly inspired by my colleagues.
5.  The delight of children anticipating Christmas.  I love being on the parental end of the holiday.

May we walk in Beauty!

Opening Bundles and Boxes

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

In March, on the morning of Spring Equinox, I put a little bundle in my garden, made up of papers and beads and cloth and ribbon.  It was to represent the prayer, the magic, the dream I had of finding a job.  I put it out there as a way to work with some of the pretty serious anxiety I was feeling about how our lives were going to take shape in the coming year and years.  I try not to deny my anxieties because I know how they can percolate up through a life and flavor everything, but these anxieties were beginning to take a pretty firm roots.  Here is the bundle after six weeks in my little faery garden:

2014 April 014

I brought it inside on May Day and opened it up.  I let the weathered objects sit on a plate on my counter for a couple weeks, trying to think about how I was going to turn them into an art project.  This step was to further focus my intention and prayer for finding a job.  I really wanted something that would fire me up and get me excited, but I was willing to take whatever came along, to be adaptable and flexible and to learn and grow quickly into whatever role came my way.

I never got to the stage of making the piece of art before the job appeared.  The perfect job.  I am under no illusions–I know it’s going to be hard work, and that sometimes it’s going to be difficult.  But teaching high school English in a setting where I have some academic freedom is about as close to my dream job as you can get.

Yesterday, I made that piece of art with a deep sense of gratitude.  The prayer of it now is that I will be equal to the task.  If you need some of that energy, I send it your way now, too.  Much love.

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The poem is by Hafiz, translated by Daniel Ladinsky

Admit something:
Everyone you see, you say to them, “Love me.”
Of course you do not do this out loud, otherwise
Someone would call the cops.
Still, though, think about this, this great pull in us to connect.
Why not become the one who lives with a
Full moon in each eye that is always saying,
With that sweet moon language, what every other eye in
This world is dying to hear?

Gratitude List:
1. Opening boxes, exploring the ideas and assumptions I’ve been storing in there.  Sorting through.  Sending some things to the burn pile, some to recycle elsewhere, putting some aside to reuse, but perhaps in different forms and different ways.  Some of those old and treasured ideas get re-packed and put away again for later, with maybe a few new ones tucked in around the edges to fill it in.  Just like attics, hearts and minds need occasional sorting, I think.
2. This verse, from a hymn yesterday morning:
Joyful is the dark, spirit of the deep,
winging wildly o’er the world’s creation,
silken sheen of midnight, plumage black and bright,
swooping with the beauty of a raven.
3. The week ahead.  Who knows what might happen next?
4.  Making art with the children.
5.  This little fur-boy purring wildly in my ear.

May we walk in Beauty!

The Truth about the Tree Poem

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Poem-A-Day Day 24 Prompt:  The title begins, “The Truth About ______”

When I said that I was transformed into a tree
perhaps it would have been more accurate
to say that I became a raven
my roots curling into claws
my branches melting into blackness
the rush of the dawn wind in my ears.

Did I say “roots” again?  Pardon me.
My feet are roots, of course, when I am a tree,
but also when I am a rainbow.
Did you know?  A rainbow has roots too
great arcing roots that mirror and reflect
their sky-form.  The earth spectrum of the underworld.
When I am a rainbow, I am a perfect circle
holding the world in my colors.

It may be closer to the truth were I to say
that one fateful day I became a stone
and sank deeply into a stillness so profound
I could not hear even my jeweled heart
burning with the brilliant fire of the Earth.
I cannot recall what happened to my night-black wings
on the day I turned into a stone.

You may think it is not possible, not true,
that right now I am actually hearing you say, “But
a person does not simply turn into a tree
or a stone, into a rainbow or a bird.”
Now, see, I have told you your own thoughts
and you can feel free to be amazed.

But how can I not hear you
when you have become
the gentlest of breezes
and whispered your protest
with a smile
into my ear?