Tag: river

Poem a Day: 10

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Poems, Poetry Prompts

The Prompts Today are Washing Dishes (which I am choosing to interpret as general quotidian household living) and There was a _______ Who ______. I needed to get away from the brooding abstractions of yesterday and into something decidedly surreal, which is where I am usually most comfortable. I come home to magical realism when I lose my writer’s voice. I feel like I am catching my stride again.

There Was a Woman Who Swallowed the Moon
by Beth Weaver-Kreider

There once was a woman who swallowed the moon.
I will not tell you that I know her.
I will not tell you that this is a lie.

I knew a woman who swallowed the moon,
felt the ice and the fire of it slide down her spine.
(No, not her throat.)
How it slid down her spine.
How it sizzled. How it burned.

I once knew a woman who swallowed a lie.
Felt it explode in her belly like stars.
Felt how her own light dimmed
and almost went out.
Girl, was she ever a mess!

I know a woman who lives in a house,
and this is how she exists in that house:
She sews things together.
She makes knots in strings.
She throws words in the air
to see which ones fall together.
She wanders down labyrinth hallways
weaving her fingerprints into all that she passes.
She steals words. This woman is a thief of words.
Just listen:

There once was a woman who wept a river.
I will not say if the river is tears.
I will not tell you about the mud,
and the stones, and the sycamore.
But this I can say:
when the weeping was done,
the river flowed through her house.
The words bobbed in the flow,
and the lie was extinguished,
and the moon was a boat she climbed into.

There once was a woman who sailed on the moon.
This is how she wailed.
This is how she moaned.
This is how she danced.
This is how she trailed a net behind her
to rescue the words she had lost.

Rhythms and Seasons

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes

Gratitude List:
1. Joy runs underneath it all, like an underground river, even when things on the surface are dry and barren.
2. Misty mornings. Sun shining through the mist in the mornings.
3. How last year’s plans inform this year’s work.
4. Rhythms, seasons, cycles.
5. Color, texture, pattern–in the visual field, and in writing and speaking and music.

May we walk in Beauty!

Across the River

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings, Poems

As of today, nearly 250 of the children abducted by the Trump/Sessions/Miller policy of family border separation remain in detention camps and facilities, months after the debacle occurred.

I carried my bones across the river and into the arms of the border patrol.
I laid my child in the hollow between sand-hills where she would be hidden.
I placed her in the quiet shade of a cactus where the little wren would sing to her.
I carried her on my back when the wind drove sand in our faces.
I tore her from the powerful arms of the river, and up the far bank

but now
she is lost in the long white hallways,
lost in the echoing rooms.
The vultures have carried her bones
to a far-off place
and all I can hear
is the screaming of sirens.

The sound fills up my bones.
There is no color but sound,
no feeling but the wailing of sirens,
the screeching and scraping,
the fierce clang of doors,
the cold bars of cages.

I carried my child to the river and now I am empty sky filled with ash.
My bones have turned to ashes and my dreams have fled
across the desert like birds.

There is nothing in this hollow place but sirens and slamming doors and questions,
the godawful questions–and a wailing that will not be silenced.

The gods have all died, blown across the sands like so much ash,
fled deep into soil like the water that has gone from this place.
Mother Mary, who sheltered us, is cast into a cage
and her child is walking alone in the maze of hallways
where she cannot reach him.

Where now is the mother?
Where is the child?
Where is the voice that will call to me
through this cacophony?

Where is the map through this desert?
Where is the red thread to follow in the wilderness?

The end is here.
The end is here.
The end is here.
And all the little birds have flown beyond the river.

I carried my bones across the river and the waters did not close about me.
I carried my child through the desert and now my story has ended.
The ashes swirl and eddy in the wind, borne into the raging arms of the river.

This is the end.
This is the end.
This is the end.

Gratitude List:
1. Making time to get some of this angst into a poem. I can breathe a little better.
2. Magical, prayerful acts. Granny squares have a really satisfying rhythm of threes: the steps of a double crochet are threes, and there are three double crochets in each set. Threes are good for the rhythm of prayer/chant.
3. How laughter helps me to breathe
4. The angle of autumn sunlight
5. Solitude

May we walk in Beauty!

I Am a Verb

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings, Poems


“Self care is not an individual act; it is a collective act.” —Yara Sallam
*
“The enemy of a love is never outside, it’s not a man or a woman, it’s what we lack in ourselves.” —Anaïs Nin
*
“Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.” —Frederick Buechner
*
“To live by a large river is to be kept in the heart of things. ” —John Haines
*
I haven’t yet read The Shack, but this passage makes me think I oughta:
“I,” she [the Holy Spirit] opened her hands to include Jesus and Papa, “I am a verb. I am that I am. I will be who I will be. I am a verb! I am alive, dynamic, ever active and moving. I am a being verb. And as my very essence is a verb, I am more attuned to verbs than nouns. Verbs such as confessing, repenting, living, loving, responding, growing, reaping, changing, sowing, running, dancing, singing, and on and on. Humans, on the other hand, have a knack for taking a verb that is alive and full of grace and turning it into a dead noun or principle that reeks of rules. Nouns exist because there is a created universe and physical reality, but the universe is only a mass of nouns, it is dead. Unless ‘I am’ there are no verbs and verbs are what makes the universe alive.” —Wm Paul Young, The Shack
*
Thomas Merton:
“There is a pervasive form of modern violence to which the idealist. . .most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence.

To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence.

The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his (or her) work. . . . It destroys the fruitfulness of his (or her). . .work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”
*
“I can’t control the world, but I can control myself. And you are not going to coerce me into hating.” —Ruby Sales
*
“Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.” —Mark Strand
*
“A characteristic of feminism is to think twice about what you know.” —Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi
*
“Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let the pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place.”  ―Iain Thomas (not Vonnegut, as everyone says)

Gratitude List:
1. Chances to breathe, to catch breath, to sigh, to yawn
2. Sunflowers, seeds, and pollinators
3. Little nap with a cat on the lap
4. Cheese
5. Reading with the kids. Right now it’s Patricia Wrede’s Chronicles of the Enchanted Forest.

May we walk in Beauty!

Small Paper Lanterns

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings


“I went down in the river to pray. . .”

‘When we get out of the glass bottles of our ego
and when we escape like squirrels turning in the cages of our personality
and get into the forests again,
we shall shiver with cold and fright
but things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves.
Cool, unlying life will rush in,
and passion will make our bodies taut with power.
We shall stamp our feet with new power and old things will fall down,
we shall laugh, and institutions will curl up like burnt paper.’
―D.H.Lawrence
*
“The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.”
―Rabindranath Tagore
*
“Every day look at a beautiful picture, read a beautiful poem, listen to some beautiful music, and if possible, say some reasonable thing.”  ―Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
*
“Abba Lot came to Abba Joseph and said: Father, according as I am able, I keep my little rule, and my little fast, my prayer, meditation and contemplative silence; and, according as I am able, I strive to cleanse my heart of thoughts: now what more should I do? The elder rose up in reply and stretched out his hands to heaven, and his fingers became like ten lamps of fire. He said: Why not become fire?” ―Christine Valters Paintner
*
“Someday, after we have mastered the winds, the waves and gravity, we shall harness for God energies of love. Then for the second time in the history of the world we will have discovered fire.” ―Teilhard de Chardin
*
“We cannot live in a world that is not our own, in a world that is interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a home. Part of the terror is to take back our own listening, to use our own voice, to see our own light.” ―Hildegard of Bingen
*
“Dare to declare who you are. It is not far from the shores of silence to the boundaries of speech. The path is not long, but the way is deep. You must not only walk there, you must be prepared to leap.” ―Hildegard of Bingen

Gratitude List:
1. This, from a song in church this morning: “Not by your finger, not by your anger, will our world order change in a day, but by your people, fearless and faithful, small paper lanterns lighting the way.” I am grateful for you and you and you, for being my small paper lanterns.
2. The young people of my church, who are small paper lanterns for me.
3. Community dinners, sitting out on the lawn, eating together, laughing, talking, remembering.
4. My tender-hearted children.
5. Anticipation of a new year.

May we walk in Beauty!

We Be Many

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes

“Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement.
Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.” –Helen Keller
*
“Be kind to yourself while blooming. I know sometimes it feels like your soul doesn’t always fit. It’s all a part of the process.” ~ Emery Allen
*
“When the first baby laughed for the first time, its laughter broke into a thousand pieces,
and they all went skipping about and that was the beginning of fairies!”
– Peter Pan
*
“We need to keep changing the attitude that teaches men to be threatened by the presence and success of women.” ~Barack Obama
*
“Every drone strike and every natural disaster and every shooting death is a child. Whatever else defines one’s existence, a person’s first identity was as someone’s child. It is never okay to kill someone’s child.” –Melissa Ressler
*
“If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.” ~William Stafford
*
“Remember this: We be many and they be few.” ~Arundhati Roy
*
“Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.”
~Wendell Berry
*
“If we go down into ourselves, we find that we possess exactly what we desire.” –Simone Weil
*
”When I think how far the onion has traveled
just to enter my stew today, I could kneel and praise
all small forgotten miracles.”
~Naomi Shihab Nye
*
“Stranger! awaken
the guitar more! Delay our tomorrow so our road
may extend and space may widen for us, and we may get rescued
from our story together: you are so much yourself … and I am
so much other than myself right here before you!” ~Mahmoud Darwish
*
“I would love to live
like a river flows,
carried by the surprise
of its own unfolding.”
–John O’Donohue
*
“It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg.
We must be hatched or go bad.” ~C.S. Lewis
*
“We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.” ~Aldo Leopold
*
“The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.”
–Wendell Berry
*
“For [mystics,] contemplation and action are not opposites, but two interdependent forms of a life that is one–a life that rushes out to a passionate communion with the true and beautiful, only that it may draw from this direct experience of Reality a new intensity wherewith to handle the world of things; and remake it, or at least some little bit of it, ‘nearer to the heart’s desire.” –Evelyn Underhill

Gratitude List:
1. Naked Ladies in everybody’s garden. Such a spring-like beauty here at the height of summer. (Some people call them Resurrection Lilies, and that might be a nice name for a contemplative person to use, but I am attached to the racier version of their name.)
2. New fur friends in the house. (How long will it take until they start to come out from under the furniture?)
3. Sunshine caught in the branches of the trees. (It’s beginning to happen already: the tilt, the slant, the hint that autumn is coming.)
4. Chances to catch up without the boys at home, but mostly: Having them back! (Absence makes the heart grow fonder.)
5. Sitting in the doorway to a new year, a new half-century.

May we walk in Beauty!

River Has Her Pathways

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings

 
River has her many pathways.

Dear Shining Girl,

You stand poised in the limbo of doorway, and the light nearly shines through you, prisming the water in your eyes.

The hallways have emptied, but for that cluster of your friends who can’t quite say goodbye.

And you, like a forest doe, still pause on the threshold, ready to bolt at hint of danger.

It has been a season of words, and I the purveyor, the pusher, the cataloguer, the demagogue of vocabulary.

But I have no words for this transparent glimmer of invisibility you wear, for the way this grief has caught you by the shoulders, the way your words suddenly lock themselves into that golden cage of your throat.

Your giddy group of comrades bounces down the hallway and you take a step out of the shadows. Their joy is a distorted mirror of your misery.

When you go from this woodland of words and the solace of chums, who will See you? Who will know who you are?

Take heart, Shining Girl. Let those words that have caught in your chest like a trapped bird beating against the windowpane–let them fill the hollow spaces until there is no more space to fill, and then they will burst forth, radiant as your name.

I will be listening for that moment.

The last day of school is so exciting for so many of us. For some, however, it is a return to uncomfortable places, long stretches of loneliness, days of not being Seen. I need to remember that not everyone is experiencing this riot of joy.

Gratitude List:
1. Dedication for the seniors this evening. Glorious group of young people, about to be unleashed upon the world. They’re a force to be reckoned with.
2. Last day. It’s a big relief for me.
3. Icarus oriole still sings from his treetops, often enough that in my short forays into the pollen-infested world, I can hear him sing.
4. Empanadas–somebody’s mother left us empanadas in the Faculty Lounge. Oy. My.
5. Lunch was Vietnamese food provided by our wonderful principals. Delicious, and a great chance to connect with colleagues before separating for the summer.

May we walk in Beauty!

The Rivers and the Bridges

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Musings

coptic-bridge
Nag Hammadi and Susquehanna (via Dreamscope app)

Being able to weave together two different photos gives me the chance to blend my obsessions. Here, the Bridge over my River, and a piece of ancient Coptic text on a papyrus. I don’t have much time these days for personal researches, but when I have a free moment, I often turn to texts from the Nag Hammadi Library. Right now, I keep a page of The Thunder, Perfect Mind open on a tab on my Chromebook. Those texts are both a bridge and a river for me. I love how this mash-up placed text where the leaves of the sycamore would be in summer, and how there seems to be the suggestion of a greater arch in the sky above the arches of the bridge.

Gratitude List:
1. The willows are putting on their shiny green dancing clothes for spring.
2. The way flocks of little birds connect the dots across the sky.
3. Three crows in a field in the dawn, bobbing their heads up and down, doing obeisance to the sunrise.
4. Tea. It has been such a non-frigid winter that I haven’t often felt the need for tea to break the chill. Lately my students have been making tea in my room, and I enjoy a couple cups a day with them, and then some in the evening. It takes away the craving for the second cup of coffee and leaves me feeling warmed from the inside out.
5. Teenagers. I don’t know why I used to be anxious about the idea of teaching in a high school. The brilliant minds, the bursting creativity, the great hearts, the developing critical thinking skills. I love them. I am learning so  much. They are also my rivers and my bridges.

May we walk in Beauty!

Simple List

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes

stump

Gratitude List:
1. The shining eyes of my students. I am carrying some of them a little heavily these days, as I become aware of the weighty anxieties that some of then hold within them.
2. Last night’s dinner. Jon cooked small shells, and mixed them with peas and spinach in a cream and parmesan sauce.
3. My new pen. I finally did it. I ordered myself a real fountain pen. It is sleek and shining and beautiful. (Unfortunately, the ink I ordered is coming in a separate package, so I need to wait a little while to try it out.)
4. Challenging and respectful conversations. I really like when people respectfully challenge my ideas. It helps to keep me honest, for one thing, but it also helps me to hone and define the ideas which I do find most compelling.
5. I know I say this one often, but it is two of my daily moments of delight: Crossing the Susquehanna on the way to and from school. I love this River. I love how it holds not only the idea of place but of time, how you can see the remnants of the ancient fishing weirs that the Susquehannocks used for catching fish.

Sun and Sunflowers

Posted on by Beth Weaver-Kreider in Gratitudes, Poems

sun-and-flowers

This river keeps rolling
rushing beneath me
even when my small boat
rests still on the water
quiet and open

Gratitude List:
1. Good Parenting is alive and well. Yesterday at Hersheypark, in the claustrophobic middle of the masses, where exhausted, grouchy parents are trying to deal with exhausted, grouchy children, I did not expect to so consistently witness such tender and attentive parenting. The whole point of going to an amusement part as a family is to have fun together, and mostly I saw adults eagerly sharing and creating a fun experience for their children.
2. Watching a child conquer his fears by going on a slightly scary roller coaster. “Let’s do that one again!”
3. Oak and sycamore and larch. The beautiful old trees at the park.
4. Seeing the world from high above. Perspective.
5. Doing the inner work. There is always a new challenge, a new practice, a new perspective to incorporate.

May we walk in Beauty!