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Not the Worst

May 30, 2026 by Rosemerry


 
 
Sometimes the worst doesn’t happen. 
  The flash flood doesn’t flow through the first floor 
    of your home. The bear doesn’t tear into your tent.
      But sometimes the train comes around a bend,
    hits a rockfall and comes off the track. Sometimes
  the rocket explodes in roiling orange fireball of methane fuel.
Sometimes the car launches from the highway into the air 
  and crashes, skids, takes out a tree, a bush, 
    then launches again, only to roll and roll. 
      When the worst happens, it doesn’t take long
    before the inner narrator spins tale after tale  
  of how much worse it could be. It can always
be worse. Knowing this, what a gift today 
  to drive up to the front door, the house still intact, 
    to walk into the home and greet both cats, 
      to water the succulents on the kitchen shelf, 
    reheat the soup from the night before, pour 
  hot water over the mint tea, hold hands 
with beloveds, say I love you, say grace.

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How the Communication Works Now

May 29, 2026 by Rosemerry

Tonight I can’t see the shape of the moon
behind a cluster of clouds, but I see 
the bright radiance seeping through the edges 
and know the moon is there—
that is how it is when I speak out loud 
to my father and son. Hi Dad, I say. 
Hi Finn. I love you. I miss you. 
And aren’t you so proud of our girl?
As I walk through the dark, scent of rain
in each breath, I can’t hear the shape 
of their words in my ears. But I swear, 
I feel it, the shine. 

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The Moment I Hope to Remember

May 28, 2026 by Rosemerry


 
 
sitting on the couch, 
our bodies lean into each other—
two aspen trees, shared roots

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One at Graduation

May 28, 2026 by Rosemerry


 
for every desk,
there was a doorway—
the threshold 
now your teacher

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The Day Before Graduation

May 27, 2026 by Rosemerry


for Vivian
 
Already she knows terrible things happen. 
Already she knows the pleasure of scrambling
in the woods at night with friends and singing
too loud and making bad choices that are sometimes
exactly the right choices. She knows sobs and 
silliness. She knows how much humans can hurt
each other. She knows how a touch or a tender
word erases nothing but creates its own plot of trust. 
 
There was a time when my job was to protect her,
filling her pages with beauty and courage and honesty.
Now my job is mostly to love her, to give her her own pen. 
Because terrible things happen. And she is the one now 
who shapes her story. Every writer knows, we write 
what we know—and what we can’t ever know. 
I pray what emerges is the impossible—an irrational,
deep rooted love for this difficult, glorious world. 

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What Goes On

May 25, 2026 by Rosemerry


Knowing it will grow back tomorrow
does not stop me from pulling
the bindweed today. Once I pulled 
bindweed as if the goal was to clear it 
from the garden. Now, I pull bindweed 
as if the goal is to love this act of being 
alive, this ritual of pulling bindweed, my 
daughter beside me, soft easy chatter 
rising between us.        There is no blessing 
or disaster yet that has ended this 
communion of tugging on the long white 
roots. Somehow, in this season of 
endings, the bindweed seems to promise
tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow. 
 

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After Watching the Difficult Film

May 24, 2026 by Rosemerry


                  with thanks to the makers of Your Attention, Please


I go to the hillside at the end of the valley
and sit beside the gray stone with his name on it.
I am in need of deep grounding.
My beloved friend comes alongside. We sit
on the ground beside the grave, frothy white 
seeds of dandelions clinging to our clothes.
We sit until the sun moves away from the valley, 
climbing toward the peaks. I do not mind being sad. 
Sad makes sense when I think of how any child 
can no longer imagine this is a world in which
they belong. This world of green aspen leaves
and alpine snow fields and delicate dandelion fluff. 
This world in which any human is made to feel 
as if they are not enough. How many? And how 
many more? I run my fingers through the tall 
cemetery grass. How green it is. My friend
and I listen to the chaos of birdsong riffling 
across the canyon. I am near destroyed
by the damn beauty of it. The tiniest drift
of cloud goes by. No, not destroyed. 
Opened. 

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

*Hey, friends, I have been going to see films at MountainFilm in Telluride this weekend, and tonight I saw such a profoundly moving, disturbing, insightful, intelligent film about the effects of social media on young people (and all of us). If you get a chance to see Your Attention, Please, it offers compelling reasons for why we might want to rethink our relationship with social media. 

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Shh

May 23, 2026 by Rosemerry


 
 
So soft and sweet the scent 
of this lilac’s first bloom
I stop trying to praise it 
and instead breathe it in—
 
the eager vibration 
of hummingbird wings
says everything.

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Intention

May 22, 2026 by Rosemerry

In the garden, fill a hole with water,
eventually it will drain. Fill it with trash, 
with poor soil, nothing—or weeds—
will grow. But fill the hole with topsoil, 
intentional seed—is it any wonder 
something beautiful eventually thrives? 
Consider the hollow left when a loved one 
is gone. Nothing will ever be the same as it was. 
But if I protect the hollow, allow into it, 
more feeling, more love, more honest connection, 
if I sow there whatever goodness I grieve, 
then how deep the roots might go. How true,
the sapling, its leaves so verdant, 
so heartachingly new, so unashamedly green. 

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Two Thousand Three Hundred Forty

May 22, 2026 by Rosemerry


 
 
That’s how many school lunches
I’ve made her, more or less, since
that first day she held my hand and we 
stood on the grass outside the elementary school
before the first bell rang. Her hair was blonde then, 
mine not gray. I’m not crying as I make her
lunch this morning. Dilled bean and rice salad. 
Fresh blackberries. Pretzel sticks. 
Honeycrisp apples sliced into thin rounds
that her friends call “floppy apples.”
Maybe I’m crying. 
Me and all the other mothers on the last
day of the last year of school. Thinking of
two thousand three hundred forty bleary mornings
when I woke to pour love into plastic containers
along with dried mango and tofu cubes,
seaweed strips and yogurt tubes.
Okay. So I’m crying. I nibble the squared off core 
of the apple to gather every last bit of sweetness.
When it’s gone, I lick the stickiness from my fingers.

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