Poet and writer for children and adults

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Works

Works for Adults

Poetry

Elizabeth S.E. McBride’s poetry is most often the natural result of a reverence for the wonders of creation and those with whom it is shared.

Her poetry can be seen in the following literary journals and publications: Dunes Review, Louisiana Literature, Third Wednesday, Red River Review, Seeding the Snow, Scintilla, Poetry Breakfast, Peninsula Poets, and Reformed Journal.

Essays

Writing about writing and craftsmanship is always a favorite essay topic among writers! But you’ll find other musings and topics here too:

Works for Children

When writing for children, Elizabeth loves finding and sharing the innate goodness, poignancy, wisdom, and humor in her stories and their characters. She loves wordplay and experiments with logic, which can be seen in both her stories and her poetry. Her published works for children can be seen in: Intergeneration Day Storytelling, ThinkKidThink March Madness 2014, and Spider Magazine for Children.

Children’s Poetry

Selected Pieces

Spring Cleaning

 

All day long
the wind was with us:

snatching our voices
stinging our eyes
flinging our car doors wide
wide open
seeking out empty
plastic bags,
plastering them across
our windshields
twisting the trees, and
creaking the rafters
hiding the baseball deep
in the culvert
thrashing the squirrel’s nests
tossing the treehouse
hurling foul darkening
tempests of rage,

then…

leaving behind
a bright wake of stars.

McBride (2022)

Awakening

 

Each night we dip our souls
into the waters of the lake
that we will one day swim.
We close our eyes, and lean
into its silken grasp’s repose,
confident of morning and the sunlight’s
bright return, and sure we will not wake
to occupy the other shore.

McBride (2021)

Ring of Silence

My hand bumps
the wide-mouthed vase
and sets off
a ring of sound
that travels
here into forever
of a silence we can’t hear,
that sings voices,
words and prayers
flung into distance
without end.

I hear again
the calling bell
that rang to take
you to Good-bye.
I see the flag they folded
slowly –
corners tight,
the way you used to
fold sheet corners on your bed;
three brass shells they
handed us
after they tore
the sky with sound
and made a way
for death to exit,
leaving us
with hollow light.

In memory of MMOM3C George A. Elliott, U. S. Navy, commemorated at Fort Custer National Cemetery, July 2, 2018.

McBride (2018)

The Faith of Birds

Before dawn,
they call into the darkness,
a growing crescendo
of announcements made in song.
“Morning Will Come!”
“Morning Will Come!”

It is as if they’ve been beyond
distant horizons, busy scouting,
and returned with their reports
to our closed, hopeless eyes.

And when the light arrives and spreads
itself like golden butter over
the tall stack of sweetened hours
that will soon become the day,
the heralders turn to
their quiet duties:
feeding, nesting, dust baths, drinks;
their civic work complete.

Later, a pair of crows calls out,
some jays warn of seeming intruders,
sparrows speak of rippled water
near the cold, but greening pond.

But their calls are nothing like
the mass of hope and song that grew
out of the darkness -JOY!- before the light.

McBride (2017)

Just Before Spring

Some limbs are bare
amongst the budded fringe of green.

The sun, unblinking, swells with warmth
to fill the cloudless blue.

South-facing lilacs
spill their colored fragrance in the air.

Finches murmur in witch hazel
saplings near the shed.

The rock pile in the farmer’s field
displays a moistened sheen.

Dandelions button furrows down
before the crops go in.

The barn stands tall with readiness;
regal simplicity:

red planks, white trim, blue sky,
one crow

riding the updraft overhead –

all

waiting.

McBride (2017)

The Dignity of Leaves

Golden leaves fall and freely scatter
the remains of their seasons to the winds.
No use in raking them into an order;
piles in neat lines that tell their stories –
and then, and then, and then.

Lay them to rest in the quiet woods
between the monuments of trees.
They will dampen and mat, mold and decay
into the life-giving syrups that seep
into the soil to fuel the beginning
of new and new, again.

Their tales of Spring and Summer are lost.
Yet, there were times when they drank the sunlight,
and there were times when they mirrored the moon.
There were times when they clung through raging
hailstorms, flounced with breezes, bowed to rains.

And they provided the shelter of shade –
before letting go of the places they’d held;
before lying down to feed their young.

McBride (2017)

  • "...the writer's ending is, for the reader, always a beginning."
    — Krista Tippett
  • "I have come to love questions more than answers, for it is in our seeking that we are most alive, most open, most willing to come to new understanding."
    — Elizabeth S.E. McBride
  • "The expansiveness that comes from thinking someone else's thoughts and seeing through someone else's eyes is the chief gift bestowed by the written word."
    — Baba Brinkman
  • "...if you listen carefully, as you read, you'll hear a voice whispering to you gently: "you are not alone."
    — Samantha Cristoforetti
  • “What you read becomes part of your human adventure, the world you will make with your words and your life.”
    — Krista Tippett
  • “There is a sweetness in being blindsided by life, by truth, by a dark corner suddenly illumined. There is sheer joy in epiphany.”
    — James Calvin Schaap
  • “…we seek an enlargement of being…We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as our own.”
    — C. S. Lewis
  • “To write is to embark on a journey whose final destination we do not know. Thus, creative writing requires a real act of trust.”
    — Henri Nouwen
  • “Editing is when you get to play with someone in the sandbox of language.”
    — Joe Morgenstern
  • “We take great care with our words, for they are meant to get into our bloodstream.”
    — Richard Foster
  • “Cherish your curiosity. It is your questions that will shape you.”
    — David Delgado
  • “Every day I walk out into the world to be dazzled, then to be reflective.”
    — Mary Oliver
  • “Writing is a process in which we discover what lives in us”
    — Henri Nouwen
  • “Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works.”
    — Virginia Woolf