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Nyctinasty

August 9, 2026 by Rosemerry

By night, the mountain gentian
closes the dark purple vase of its petals,
tightening around its most vulnerable parts,
protecting its nectar from cold night air,
from heavy dew. Everything is at stake. 
 
Oh woman who longs to stay open, 
to ever unfold, to widen your arms
in an ever expansive reach, 
what do you have to learn 
from the wisdom of wildflower, 
from the natural systole and diastole
of open and close, open and close?
 
How might your own growth
depend on learning to wrap 
those well-intentioned arms
around your own center 
and tuck in to that primary,
essential embrace? 
 

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One Mirroring

August 9, 2026 by Rosemerry

We are in it together,
this certainty we are alone.

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After Years of Rushing

August 9, 2026 by Rosemerry

Today

more fen

than stream,

I draw

my source

from depths

unseen.

No need

to move,

how still,

how clear

am 

I.

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At High Camp Hut

August 9, 2026 by Rosemerry

for Lacy, Ellen, Jessi Lu and Lisa
 
 
In the darkness, Lacy points us toward two stars
stacked in a vertical line just above the horizon. 
She teaches us to see the parallelogram
of a celestial teapot, then guides us 
to find the spout which empties out
into the very center of our galaxy.
Naked, we stare at the distant milky glow
and know in our bones the center is not, 
in fact, light years away, but right here
in our wood-fired hot tub in the middle 
of a meadow with mountains all around.
Or wherever women commune, says Jessi Lu.
Yes, this is the tea cup right here, a cup
overflowing with laughter, tears, stories,
heart, and an ancient swirl of glittering stars.
 

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Re-Seeing (and gone for a few days)

August 5, 2026 by Rosemerry

Re-Seeing
 
 
This morning I saw my hand and marveled—
the smoothness of the finger pads
like sandstone eroded by centuries of wind,
the wrinkled cords between the pointer
and the thumb like cottonwood roots rising
out of the ground, the fine wrinkles in the knuckles
like thin braided strands of spider silk, 
the splotchy spots of white below the plush heel,
like small puffs of morning clouds in the desert.
This hand that has held weeping children 
and planted beets, scraped cat vomit from the carpet 
and carried river stones to build a home. I stared 
at this hand I have known my whole life and wept
for the sheer miracle of hand, how even the most 
familiar, intimate parts of ourselves, the parts we take
most for granted, have the most to teach us about 
gratefulness, about how to see and meet the world. 


—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

*

Hey friends, I will be away for four days, teaching remotely in the glorious San Juans at High Camp Hut with no cell, no wifi, and lots of spaciousness. I’ll be back with poems on Sunday night. In the meantime, if you are jonesing for poems, you can find them on my blog (a backlog of poems from the last 12 years or so): A Hundred Falling Veils. 

Or, you can subscribe to the Ritual app on your phone and there I read a poem every day (twice!) and offer ways to think about it and also optional writing invitations. You can find that on your phone here (there is a small fee to subscribe): The Poetic Path

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The Teacher

August 4, 2026 by Rosemerry


 
The cantaloupe was golden 
beneath its raised veins, 
the globe of it heavy in my hands,
its musky perfume filling the hot 
summer air at the farmstand.
 
When I handed the woman my money, 
I was paying her not so much for this melon, 
but for the memory of other melons
we have shared when I moaned my delight,
the sweet orange flesh deliquescing 
in our eager mouths.  
 
This melon was no such melon. 
Though we waited and waited, 
when I sliced in and offered you a bite,
we both agreed the flesh was a bit too hard, 
the flavor sweet but a little flat. 
A fine-enough melon. But not a melon
for rhapsodizing or writing an ode.
 
I think of Grandma Betty, how 
in her later years it didn’t matter
what you served her, she would always declare, 
This is the best pie I ever had. 
This is the best tea I’ve ever had. 
This is the best. The best. 
 
This is not the best cantaloupe I have ever had, 
just a substandard stand in for ecstasy. Yet here I am 
writing an ode to this mediocre melon, learning again 
how my longing for something to be different than it is
can destroy any joy found in what is here. 
Somehow, this fine-enough melon is bringing me to my knees 
at the altar of the moment, humbling me, inviting me to question 
how I choose to meet the world. 
It is, perhaps, after all, the best melon I have ever had. 

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Fledgling

August 3, 2026 by Rosemerry

 
 
Now that I know for certain she will leave me, 
I dare to love her more. Her room will be empty.
The house no longer filled with her music. 
The spilling trills of her laughter too far away to hear. 
I have known since her birth she would leave me, 
but knowing is different from feeling, and her absence 
comes so soon. At the same time the heart lets her go, 
lets her go, lets her go, it leans in closer, becomes a sanctuary 
that knows no walls, a nest as wide as the world. 
At the same time I release her, I fall more deeply in love 
with the way she croons to her cat, with the feathery softness
of her skin, with how a song is ever winging from her lips. 
I welcome it, this ache. These tears were always meant 
to be cried. This heart was always meant to break. 

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At the Poetry Slam Championship in Kansas

August 2, 2026 by Rosemerry


 
 
There in the church of poetry
beneath fluorescent lights
on a makeshift stage, 
one naked heart
after another came to the mic
and through words and breath
they turned wound into blossom 
again and again until the evening
became a giant bouquet
of the unbearable being borne.
It is a terrible gift to make beauty 
out of suffering,
and this is the gift we most need.
But what stays with me, too,
was how each time a poet was called up,
a woman in the middle of the audience
with a voice made of equal parts
midnight and salve
would croon low and smooth, 
Let’s go, poet. 
Each time she spoke it, 
she made a red carpet out of sound, 
a generous path for the poet to step onto.
Each time, she spoke it, 
I felt my whole being soften and open
through the alchemy of encouragement. 
This, too, the gift we most need—
to dare to turn toward
what makes each other bleed.
This, too, transforms wound into generous bloom, 
the gift of hearing and hailing,
honoring each other’s humanness, 
saying yes, I see you, I see you. 

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Reunion

August 1, 2026 by Rosemerry


 
 
Thirty million years ago, 
a number I can say but cannot
comprehend, the mountains 
 
where we hiked today
were covered in a deep layer
of volcanic ash which somehow
 
formed the spire of Lizard Head Peak.
I am constantly stunned by this world
that makes and remakes itself 
 
out of the same matter.
How complicated, yet how simple:
we all belong to each other—
 
a thought that, for a time, 
made me feel like a crumbling mountain
walking among crumbling mountains, 
 
like a dry stream bed walking 
along the dry stream bed, 
like a clover gone to seed 
 
walking amongst fields 
of dry, papery clover petals,
every step a reunion.
 
 

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One Breath

July 31, 2026 by Rosemerry

from the same trumpet 
emerges this song with both legs broken,
this song rising on triumphant wings 

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