water

Daughters

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 2 Comments

As I read the first line of Eavan Boland’s poem “The Lost Land,” I felt as though I knew exactly what the second line was going to be.  I was almost shocked when I read her second line and saw that it was not what had happened in my own head.  I think that means that I need to write my own “daughters” poem.  I’m not sure where it will take me.  I have been mulling different places to take it for a week or so now.  If I can find a breath between the stacks of grading, I’ll try some exercises to shake it out.  Here, for now, are the first two lines.  The first is stolen from Eavan Boland, and the second is the compulsion line that forced itself out before I could read further in her poem.

I have two daughters.
Their names are Memory and Loss.

Gratitude List:
1. Autumn breezes.  Thermal delight.
2. Breaking through.
3. Apples.
4. Walking through the doorways.
5. Water.

May the waters flow free for all.  May all people find safety.  May we walk in Beauty.

Language Event II

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

In this book of Native American poems and rituals, “Language Event II” is labelled  Navajo, and goes like this:

Hold a conversation in which everything refers to water.
If somebody comes in the room, say: “Someone’s floating in.”
If someone sits down, say: “It looks like someone just stopped floating.”

(Shaking the Pumpkin: Traditional Poetry of the Native American Indians, edited by Jerome Rothenberg)

That’s all there is to it.  It reads like a drama exercise or a poetry writing prompt.

I keep trying to write a poem, but none are swimming my way at the moment.  Perhaps this is one I’ll try as a verbal exercise throughout the day and see if my children notice.

Gratitude List:
1. A snow day.
2. The way those indigo afternoon shadows flowed across the snowy landscape.
3. The way snow brings every branch and twig into high relief.
4. Persephone never fails to return.  She will rise.
5. Fresh start.  Tabula rasa.  Blank pages.  Snowy fields.

May we walk in Beauty!

 

Taking a Walk

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Random thoughts from a walk around the farm this afternoon:

–This Step-Counting contest at school is doing what it is supposed to, getting me out and walking.  I am afraid I am letting my team down with my low, low numbers.  I am more sedentary than I admitted to myself–grading and FB and granny squares and playing Legos keeps me sitting in one place.  A lot.
–On one hand the pedometer feels like a ball and chain.  I check it every half hour or so throughout the day, and I am feeling incredible pressure to get up and walking.  On the other hand, it pushes me to get outside and walk, which I don’t usually take the time for, so it’s freeing me, too.
–I like being on a walk.  I live having been walking.  I like having walked.  I just don’t like going walking.  It’s the anticipation and the getting myself in gear part that I don’t like.
–There were tracks everywhere in the last bits of snow and slush: deer, squirrel, bird, bird, bird, and canid.  Maybe that last is fox, maybe dog, maybe coyote.
–I haven’t seen a coyote in years, though Jon saw a pair of them only a couple weeks ago.  I was pretty desperate to find evidence of them in the tracks today.  One set of tracks had a really largish print, and the claws pushed deep into the snow.
–I found a grey-ish owl pellet and broke it apart to look for the mouse bones. But then I realized it was probably a misshapen piece of raccoon poo.
–The bees are sleeping.  I wonder how they’re surviving the winter in their hive.
–I found two unopened pods in one of the milkweed patches.  We brought them down to the house.  Jon has been collecting milkweed seeds with the hope that he can get some to grow in the spring to give away.
–One Small Boy came up to me and said, “Best snack ever!” as he crunched a chunk of ice in his left hand and then chewed off a bite of the kale in his right hand.
–That yellow frost-nipped kale looks about as winter-bitten as I feel right now.

 

Gratitude List:
1. Wind that scours
2. Fire that transforms
3. Water that purifies
4. Earth that supports
5. Spirit that inspires

May we walk in Beauty!

Release the Past

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Yesterday’s poem.  I wrote it in response to a photo I saw on my Facebook feed of a person standing in the doorway between two trees at the edge of a wood.

Every step you take is a doorway to somewhere new,
a choice between what was and what will be.
Do not fear the darkness behind you
nor the mists that rise in your path.

Pause on the threshold a moment.
Take a deep and aching breath,and straighten your shoulders.

Release the past with gratitude
for all that it has taught you,
and step forward in strength and beauty.

 

Gratitude List:
1.  Waking up late and lounging in bed.  After that last six-week string of insomniac nights, to finally be able to sleep long again, and then to wake up in the morning and just curl up under the feather quilt listening to the quiet sounds of man and boy talking downstairs–that was a joy.  I feel like Bilbo at Rivendell, rejuvenating to the sound of elves.
2.  Always in autumn,that slant of light.  The way it slips over the ridge to the southeast and hits the trees at the edge of the bosque in the western deep of the hollow.  The way it glows on the last of the golden walnut leaves.
3.  Breakfast.
4.  Rachel Carson.
5.  Water.

May the waters all run free and clean and clear.

May the Waters All Run Free

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Yesterday’s prompt was to write a poem about water.  This is too big a subject for one day’s musing.  This poem will be a place-holder, an early draft.

May the Waters All Run Free

Remember your waters, children,
remember your waters.
Cherish the waters you come from.
Cherish the waters you belong to.

Listen, every day, for the flow,
the whoosh and shush
of the waters that run
in the rivers in your body.

Gather the waters that fall,
that run in streams down your roof.
Sprinkle them on the earth
and the thirsty green world
like a baptism, like a blessing.

Stand in the rain with your hands outstretched
and your face turned toward the sky.
Soak it in like a plant.

Find your rivers, your creeks.
Know them and speak to them.
Become a watcher of rivers,
a guardian of flow.
Tend them by your observation.
Let every river you cross
receive your attention, your benediction.

Remember your waters, children.
Remember your waters.

Immerse yourself in lakes and oceans.
Let water hold you, raise you.
Let water buoy you up.
Give over your control
to the arms of mother ocean.

Wander the borderlands
between the solid earth and water.
Learn the names and voices
of the ones who live there,
in the spaces between.

Walk back in your memories
to your very first waters,
the rivers and lakes of your childhood,
the ponds and the puddles and creeks.
Then walk further back and remember
the water you came from,
the amniotic sea where you were formed,
where you took shape.

Remember your waters, children.
Remember your waters.
May the waters all run free.
May the waters all run clean.

Found Poem

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

I found this poem on page 40 of the September 2004 issue of Sojourners Magazine.  In an article by Danny Duncan Collum about Michael Moore’s then-new movie Fahrenheit 911, I circled some words and blacked out the rest.  Here is the result.  It’s a little more disjointed than I want it to be, but it’s really about playing around, seeing what sense I can make out of seeming nonsense, what happens when half-random words and phrases are created and strung together, what meaning is suggested.

DREAM

I saw Che Guevara on a day filled with omens
we went to lunch there, on the big screen
he won’t go back

I am troubling the dead
I won’t tell you this again

that didn’t happen
today he is lucky to be rooted
in this great global anthem

I pulled a few interesting quotations directly out of the article:
“The war is not meant to be won.  It is meant to be continuous.”  George Orwell
“If you let the world change you, you can change the world.”  from The Motorcycle Diaries

Gratitude List:
1.  Hearing the story through the voices of young people and children
2.  Visual Poetry
3.  Songs of journey, songs of water–“Wade in the water, children”
4.  Gentle guides through the liminal spaces
5.  Community support for unpacking uncomfortable, anxious and difficult questions, powerful questions

May we walk in Beauty!

Five Sacred Elements

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

<Prompt 17: Write an element poem>

I call upon the air,
the breezy inspirations,
the winds that bring ideas,
that cut through the muddle
like a sword of sharp steel.

I call upon the fire,
the passion that ignites,
creative force that excites
the Muse and drives
the enterprise, the energy
that awakens the spirit.

I call upon the water,
deep peace and dream seeking,
realm of the heart, and
keeper of intuitions.
The flow and the flood,
the ocean around us.

I call upon the earth,
the ground of our being,
the rocks and the stones,
the caves, and the bones
of the ancestors.

I call upon center,
great mystery and spirit,
the hub and the wheel,
the home and the fulcrum,
the life-force, the bringer
of balance and union.

Gratitude List:
1.  That lunch.  Wow.  Good friends, never enough time for conversation, food from all over the world.
2.  Lifetime friends.
3.  Good singing
4.  Old Turtle
5.  Feathers.  No, stones.  Both.

May we walk in Beauty.

Running Water

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Gratitude List:
1.  Running water.  Sometimes you need to lose a thing for a while so that you can truly appreciate it again.  And I also pledge to take its conservation in my home more seriously again.
2.  Jon Weaver-Kreider, the farmer-plumber-mechanic-dad-husband-trickster of Goldfinch Farm.
3.  Marie’s marvelous magical painting of a tree.
4.  Good, thoughtful conversations.
5.  How love makes us be better people.

May you never hunger.  May you never thirst.  May the waters always run free.

Where’s the Water?

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Gratitude List:
1.  I got all the mud washed off the boys before the water pump died.
2.  Jon knows how to figure out what’s wrong and solve the problem when there is suddenly no water.  Good man!
3.  Reading Owls in the Family with the boys.  Hearing my own mother’s voice behind my own from the days when she read it to me.  Laughing and laughing.
4.  Taking the work seriously.
5.  Yesterday was so easy–they just kept coming.  Today it’s really hard to get to five things to be grateful for.  I was so sure that I’d have a shower and be reading the kids to sleep by now.  But Jon and Ellis are off buying a new pump, and I am sitting here sticky and filthy and covered in dust and grit from cleaning in the garage all day.  I realize how my state of being really affects my ability to find things to be grateful for.  So I guess that’s my fifth one for today: learning to exist in many different states.  And also the anticipation of a shower when Jon gets home and gets the water pump fixed.

May we walk in beauty.

Don’t Know Where It Came From

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

Today green the sun rose
and red down again descended.
Sang high in golden birds were singing,
wild the morning spent.

Before the west began in shadow,
out of yonder called the day.
Within the margin birds at vespers
all for indigo, for summons.

Release!  The day, the wander
wondering in the finches’ song.
I would have dawned a tangerine sun
but the orb forgave my tardiness.

Gratitude List:
1.  The way sun twinkles through oak leaves.
2.  Butter-yellow Tiger Swallowtail.
3.  Always beginning again.
4.  Water is flowing.
5.  There is no expiration date on my dreams.

May we walk in Beauty!