spring

Numinous

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

I am really liking the word numinous.  Jon gave it to me to chew on the other day.  He will occasionally do that.  “Do you know what numinous means?”  And I’ll do my best to describe what I think it means, and then he’ll read me the dictionary definition.  And he doesn’t do it to trick or trap me–he looks up words that capture his attention, and then shares them.  He also gave me noetic the other day.  I like them both, numinous like luminous, and not dissimilar in meaning either.  Luminous, but more so.  And noetic like poetic, and also not dissimilar, but more scholarly, perhaps; the poetry of intellect.

2013 April 032

 

Gratitude List:
1.  This day, 26 years ago.  Pizza, pool, and a penny for good luck.  I decided that it was time to tell that cute shy boy how much I liked him.  Turns out, he liked me too.  He’s still cute, and sort of shy, and I like him a whole, whole lot.
2.  Flinchbaugh’s Orchard, you are so beautiful!  People, if you live near Ducktown Rd., you owe it to your soul to go sigh at their trees.   Springtime, you may be one tough goddess in your big old mud boots, but I can see your frilly pink petticoats.
3.  Rain.  The fields need it and it’s really beautiful and it makes me feel like I am in Scotland and it brings out the intensity of the colors of spring.  I can repair the Poet-Tree tomorrow.
4.  So many lessons to learn.  This may be turning a challenge into a gratitude.  I think I will never be an expert in matters of heart and friendship and interacting with people.  Sometimes I feel so awkward about who to be, how to be.  But that means there is always something to learn, always a new path to explore.  And for that I really am grateful.  Trying to be, yes.  And am.
5.  Good well-child checks today.
May we walk in beauty.

Ready for My Big Girl Boots

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

I’m gonna be bustin’ out all over, see,
and breaking the rules,
like Spring did when she came
stomping up over the hillside
in her kick-ass boots.
Spring, she’s all bluster and whoosh.

Did you see how she stood,
one foot on each rim of the ridge,
cocked her elbows akimbo,
flounced her frilly pink petticoat
and hooted and hollered
all over the hollow?

Because I want that kind of magic,
that fearlessness and fiercesomeness,
that wild-hearted yodel and galumph.
And a pair of those big girl boots.

Spring, she nodded and winked
at the wide-eyed rooster
on the weather vane.
“Tag!  You’re it!”
Then she skipped off to the River,
over the folding foothills of Mt. Pisgah,
spreading a carpet of green behind her.

(edited 3-17-14)

2013 April 027

Gratitude List:
1.   Sitting by the creek near this tree with a good novel (The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield) and watching my boy engineer dams and pools in the creek, catch crawcrabs.  He’s so sparkly.  Better than a nap, any day.
2.  Play group!  Watching the children grow.  That amazing homemade nutella.
3.  Freckled nose
4.  Making stuff
5.  Wind.  For clearing.  For inspiring.  For bringing a new thing.  For the gypsy ache to move and shift.  For music in the woods.  For words that blow through the woods.
May we walk in Beauty.

More from the Queen of Swords

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

I’m just a seer, not a sibyl.
Thing is, no one seems to get the difference.
Expecting me to know the future,
to sniff the wind like a wolf
and Know.  Like that.
What’s coming up the pike.
How the caribou are moving in the valley.
Whether someone is about to leave the room.

I’m really always the last one to know.
Call it the handicap of my profession.
So much lies outside my sensing.
Perhaps I am the wolf indeed,
smelling the rabbit in the underbrush
but missing the smell of fire
when the wind blows the other way.

The little breezes that blow
this way and that
and swirl around the valley,
they only serve to tickle my nose,
to confuse my brain.
I need a strong and steady wind
from one direction to get my bearings.

It doesn’t make me a liar
and it doesn’t make you a fraud.
But now I see what you meant
about the lonely tundra.

2013 April 025

Gratitude List:
1.  Forsythia:  Last summer the township butchered our poor neglected forsythia that they deemed to be growing too close to the road.  She took those wounded arms, laid them out on the ground, and dug her fingers into the soil.  So many little bushes growing from her wounds!
2.  More birdsong:  Screech Owl in the afternoon, and cuckoo, and woodpecker.  More more more mockingbird.
3.  Breaking the rules.  This is about poetry and then maybe it’s not.  Perhaps it’s about springtime and the poem I am going to write soon about her big boots.
4.  Fatboy Slim and Praise.  And love poetry, sensual and praiseful.
5.  The sun.  Did I say the sun?  Yesterday I said Vitamin D which means the sun and means that something is blooming inside me.  And oops, I mentioned spring in #3 already, but there it is again.  And did I say that I would be starting to break the rules?
May we walk through poems.

Look Out the Window

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

My friend Mara’s poetry Prompt from last Saturday (I’m a late bloomer):  “Look out the window. Notice what’s there. Notice what’s not there. Write about it.”

Outside my window in the dying day
the little wooden spring house
is a smudge of white
set among the briars
at the edge of the little bosque.

Outside my window
the pear tree begins
to push its leaves
into being.

Like the fox that dashed
over the hillside in the winter
you have passed
through this place
and away.
I wish I could have offered you both
a place of safety.

April 045

Gratitude List:
1.  The bombastic and creative robot parade.  Hours of fun with cardboard boxes.
2.  Clearing away the vines
3.  Respectful disagreement, and how it helps me to be a better version of me when you respect me enough to disagree with me
4.  A new book of poetry is taking shape!
5.  Words, lovely words, especially adjectives: recursive, numinous, bombastic, noetic. . .

May we walk in beauty.