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Two-Week Hiatus in Posting Poems and Lots of Upcoming Programs in Person and Online

April 4, 2026 by Rosemerry

Every year, I take a two-week break from sending poems so I can be away from the computer and focus on being with my family. I will write poems the old fashioned way–in my note book. And there they will stay until April 20 when I return to the computer and sending out daily poems. At that point I will send you a big bouquet of poems I wrote in the meantime! And then we’ll return to the regular daily poem routine. 

If you want poems during this hiatus, please visit my blog, A Hundred Falling Veils, where you can find poems from the past 15 years or so. (https://ahundredfallingveils.com/)

Or subscribe to my daily audio poetry program, The Poetic Path, found on the Ritual app on your phone. (The Poetic Path)

And please plan to join me in person or online when I get back!

More poems soon! 
Rosemerry

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Upcoming Events Online

April 25
Poetic Medicine Summit 2026
Writing Ourselves into Wonder: Meeting Difficult Times with Poetry
10 a.m.-2 p.m. mountain time
For more info and register, visit here or write summit@poeticmedicine.org

May 6
The Mystery of Grief: Writing into the Loss
5-7 p.m. mountain time
recorded
For more info and to register, visit here. 

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Upcoming Events In Person

April 24, 25, 26
Ars Nova, Shared Visions
Lakewood and Boulder, CO
To purchase tickets and for more information, visit HERE.

April 30, 6 p.m. 
Word Sharks: Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, Art Goodtimes & David Feela 
Dolores Public Library, 1002 Railroad Avenue, Dolores, CO
Contact Jillian at jillian@doloreslibrary.org

June 14-19
Regenerating Joy: Poetry as a Practice for Difficult Times Retreat with James Crews
Omega Institute, Rhinebeck New York
To register, click HERE

August 6-9
Poetry Inspired By Nature Retreat at High Camp Hut
Telluride, CO
For more information, visit
https://www.highcamphut.com/poetry

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Head Down

April 4, 2026 by Rosemerry


 
 
so focused 
on writing
about beauty
I almost
didn’t notice
the round
green scent
of aliveness
flourishing wildly
all around me

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At the Senior Dance Recital

April 2, 2026 by Rosemerry


 
After fourteen years of pink leotards
and bobby pins, sewing ribbons
on pointe shoes and driving home late
from rehearsals, she dances tonight
with feline ease, confidence in the curl
of her fingers, grace in her glance
as she follows the gentle lift of her arm, 
and instead of trying to capture
this final recital in pixels, I bid myself
to be completely here, following her
leaps and feeling the fierce inner deluge 
of joy and pride and love and thrill
as for one last time she smiles 
from the stage and I see her as
the small white-winged angel who could 
barely plié, and I see her now as she soars,
almost flies, before, with a wave of her arm,
she bows, turns toward the wings, disappears.

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On Any Given Wednesday

April 2, 2026 by Rosemerry


 
After the lunch has been made and the breakfast done
and the cats are fed and the child has left for school, 
it’s no small thing to slide back into bed with your partner.
Before coffee. Before the day takes you separate ways. 
Before phone, before bills, before the endless list. 
With the earth ever spinning toward tomorrow, 
it’s no small thing to eschew the work, the work out, the walk,
and choose instead to map your naked body to his, to reenter
the realm of rumpled sheets and meet in the temple of touch.
Decades of choices, most of them small. This is how a life 
is made, the clothes in a heap on the floor, the air in the room
so quiet, so cool, your bodies together so warm.

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The Reflection

March 31, 2026 by Rosemerry


 
It was late evening. I was sitting on the couch, the purple one my husband made, when I felt the small tickle traveling from my forearm to my wrist. Not wearing my glasses, I held out my arm for my husband to look. “What is it?” I asked. “A tick,” he said, his voice flat, matter of fact. He pinched it in his fingers, then took it to the counter and crushed it with the bottom of a water glass. I had had a good day, listening to a woman speak about how she could still be compassionate toward her mother after years of abuse. I had gone to a dinner in honor of my husband for difficult work well done. I was proud of him and said kind and true things about how I had seen him grow. The skin where the tick had been continued to tickle. In fact, I felt the light prickle of tick legs walking on almost every part of my body. I had to take everything off. I stood in front of the mirror and saw what wasn’t there. No tick. Nor the body I once had. It was not easy to look. I asked my eyes to remember it is possible to say something compassionate, something matter of fact, something true. 
 

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True Story

March 30, 2026 by Rosemerry


 
“What on earth can we do to make this sad and beautiful world a little softer for everyone?” — Shannan Martin, The Ministry of Ordinary Places
 
 
Once there was a woman who knit. 
She knit the sky and the cemetery,
narrow alleys and the deep sea, the highway
and the willow, starlight and the bare bulb. 
It was not easy to slip such things onto her needles, 
but she knew she could do hard things. 
Of course, she doubted herself. 
That did not stop her from knitting.
Every moment of every day, the chance 
to add everything she saw and tasted, felt
and heard, into one blanket large enough 
to touch everyone. It never was quite large enough,
though, she every day, she kept on knitting.
She could feel herself how silky, how cozy it was. 
What makes softness is no secret. It is love.
Sometimes she dropped a stitch. Sometimes
she lost the pattern and had to start a row over.
Sometimes she had to make up something new. 
But she knew what she had to do. Something. Anything. 
Everything she could to make this sad and beautiful
world a little softer for everyone. There is no end
to the work she does. Every day, she picks
it up, admires the progress she’s made, worries
about the holes, starts her knitting again. 
 

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The Arrangement

March 30, 2026 by Rosemerry


 
 
Because touch is one way we offer praise, 
this morning I touch my ears 
to the see-sawing song of birds 
in the tree beside me. I still myself
to focus on their song, and they stop 
singing, as if to tease. I touch my ears 
to the silence where the song is not. 
Touch the warm tones of wind chimes 
stirred by a breeze I barely feel. 
Touch the hum of the cars
and the growl of a motorcycle I’d rather 
shut out. I think of how my grandmother 
used grass, even weeds in her flower arrangements. 
She taught me you could make anything beautiful.
I try to stop slandering the traffic noise
and gather it into an audible bouquet complete
with birds, chimes, silence, my breath. 
How to make the unwelcome welcome? 
How to hold tension in ways that compliment? 
All morning, all day, I practice opening 
to what isn’t easy to love. I make a vase
of the moment. Add all the sound that’s here. 
So much I’d rather not to listen to. 
I think of my grandmother. I try to find 
new ways to hear.  

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As We Marched

March 29, 2026 by Rosemerry


 
 
I imagined every step a step toward integrity, 
toward justice. Toward language that respects
diversity. Every step a step toward equality. Truth. 
I imagined every step one step closer to peace 
in our country, toward peace in the world. 
I am old enough to not believe in arrivals, 
I am fool enough to believe in love. 
I am human enough to believe in community. 
I am scientist enough to know we need each other. 
Perhaps some part of me wondered what good it did 
for a few hundred people in a remote mountain town 
to walk together a few blocks, chanting, then walk 
back to the courthouse again, but tonight, in my body,
I feel it, the trust in humanity that rises when I think
of how we gathered and drummed and believed
in what our country can be. My heart beats 
a new rhythm in time with belonging.
“This is what democracy looks like.” 
Tonight, after we’ve all gone home, 
I know we’re all still marching. 

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In Time

March 28, 2026 by Rosemerry


 
 
In soil not yet worked this spring,
two perfect rows of parsley emerge 
in a curly leafed celebration of green, 
vestiges from last year’s planting.
Where is not garden? 
Good hands, what will you do 
with this new trust rising
out of what looked like failure?

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Nothing

March 26, 2026 by Rosemerry


 
 
Today, for a time, I am more red rock cliff than river. 
I sit and do not do. 
Perhaps some part of me crumbles. 
I do not resist the crumbling. 
I do not resist stillness. 
I am weary of resisting. 
So weary that today 
I promised myself
I would make time for nothingness. 
What pleasure I found in not rushing, 
not rising, not streaming, not traveling to, 
not coming from. 
Why have I put off, again and again,
the chance to be intimate
with nothing? 
Yesterday, when I heard myself 
tell a friend my experience of nothing 
is what I think God is, 
then I wondered why I fill my hours 
with so much everything? 
So today I cliff. I rock wall. 
I sandstone. I canyon. 
I sit still and undo 
and meet the great nothing 
that holds up everything.

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