Today again I thank the arugula
for the way it teaches me
that sharpness, too, is what
draws us in, that we come
not just to forgive
but to crave what is bitter,
what bites us back.
Archive for June, 2020
Hankering
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged arugula, bitterness, food, paradox on June 30, 2020| 2 Comments »
Prophecy
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged home, milkweed, self image, self worth on June 29, 2020| 2 Comments »
One day you will forget to question your worthiness.
No matter what door you walk through, even your own,
you will feel no need to apologize,
concede no need to defend.
You’ll set down your big suitcase of hope
and never ever open it again.
It will not matter if you are greeted by others
with kisses or with snarls, no, you will know
your own value the way milkweeds do,
which is to say, not at all.
Common as dandelions.
Complex as supernova.
Your worth will be that natural, that assumed.
Helping My Parents Move
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, housework, kitchen, love, mother on June 29, 2020| 5 Comments »
At seven, I sat on a towel in front of the freezer
with the blow dryer, a sponge and a bucket
to earn money for a new plastic recorder.
Oh, how I wanted that reward.
So for hours, I switched the blow dryer
from one hand to the other, inwardly fussy,
wishing mom would just buy it for me.
How enormous the task seemed then.
When that brown recorder
finally came in a beige vinyl pouch,
I played “Hot Cross Buns” like I meant it.
I blew “Ode to Joy” in bright torture through the house,
and mangled “Mary Had a Little Lamb,”
but oh was I happy.
Now, scrubbing my parent’s refrigerator
I see how the tables have turned,
how the work becomes its own reward.
Decades of my parent’s love and sacrifice
bring me to this moment, when,
kneeling in front of the fridge,
sponge in hand, bucket beside me,
I feel like the luckiest woman alive,
Mom going through the cupboards beside me,
humming “Love is Blue,” perhaps a little out tune,
but oh, she is happy, so happy.
One Illumining
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged moon, night, silence on June 27, 2020| Leave a Comment »
Riding Bikes with My Brother at Fifty
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged brother, family, love, summer on June 26, 2020| 7 Comments »
We ride on the rusty old bikes
in the swelter of June,
legs pumping, waving at strangers,
the wind making a kite
of our laughter—
The eight-year-old version of me
would never believe
about how happy we are—
she’s still ratting her brother out
to the recess guard.
But here we are, like two
young kids, playing in summer—
sticky hands and suntanned arms,
the years an ocean,
our love a boat.
One Wild Ride
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged family on June 25, 2020| Leave a Comment »
Pulling Off I-70 Between Grand Junction and Denver
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged driving, quietude, solitude, stillness on June 24, 2020| 5 Comments »
I want to linger at the side of the road
where the dark birds sing into the eddies of dawn,
yes linger in the low-angled light, in the big-hearted shadow
that blankets this bend in the canyon. Though I have many
miles to drive before I arrive, let me stay here
a while beside the river, still for a willowy moment, the water
the only thing moving. How many landscapes do I pass
without meeting them? How many worlds do I miss
as I rush from one here to the next? Oh bless this
quiet, where there is no hum of highway, no rumble,
no center line, no blur. Why do I so seldom linger,
my bones full of rush and current. In this moment,
I remember how deeply I love the stillness of rocks
that haven’t moved for a thousand years, the calm
of the dirt that has nowhere, nowhere to go.
One Important Tool
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged resistance, tool on June 23, 2020| Leave a Comment »
Storage
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged garden, song, sonnet on June 22, 2020| Leave a Comment »
I want to hear the green song in the veins of the leaves,
the dark song of soil as it warms in the midsummer sun.
I want to learn the low ballad of beets as they swell,
the racy soprano of strawberries flirty and sweet,
the slow bass of the lonesome potatoes as they fill out their lumps.
How have I not harmonized with the thrust of sunflowers?
How have I missed the chive chorus? The verses of nasturtium?
The chanting of onions as they steep in their own minor key?
If there is a garden holler known by the garlic,
world, teach it to me. I want to hear the carrots
as they reach trustingly down, down, down.
I want to carry those midsummer songs in my bones
so when winter comes, and I forget how things grow,
though it’s quiet and cold, I’ll remember, I’ll remember.
Only one day a year gets to be the longest day,
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged love, solstice, summer, sun on June 22, 2020| 5 Comments »
though during midsummer in Finland, the sun will float
above the horizon line for weeks, and each light-soaked
day seems longest. That is what I wish for you—
day after day of unsetting love, whole months when you feel
the most beloved, the most seen, the most embraced
for exactly who you are. I want to send you
giant bouquets of days, all of them the loveliest,
all of them invitations to feel the most wholly yourself.
And on the shorter days when warmth feels distant,
those are the days I want to remind you that it’s normal
to feel unlovable. It’s normal to feel not enough.
It’s normal to wish (unreasonable though it is)
that those days would disappear and every day could be
the best day, the longest light, the day most soaked with love.
On Red Mountain Pass
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged friendship, mountains, path on June 21, 2020| Leave a Comment »
for C, A, A, A and J
I want to share with you a trail with no map
and the clean scent of spruce and a clear Colorado sky.
I want to spend an afternoon above tree line
in a field of corn lilies and alpine buttercups
the pica chirping brightly in the rockfall.
Let’s not find the lake we were looking for.
Let’s stop where our feet say stop.
I want to share a leap and a shimmy,
a chocolate cookie, the mighty salt of love.
I want to slide down snowfields on our raincoats,
to find more paths to take another day,
to wade through the cold rush of change.
I want to take a bolt cutter to any door
that won’t let us in, to let the ears of my heart
attune to your words, to lose our hats to the wind
and find them again. And as the night
fills the room, I want to sing as the guitar
of friendship finds a new tune. I want to hear it
play on long after the day has gone.
Lights Out
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, father, story on June 20, 2020| 5 Comments »
We would be tucked into our twin beds,
and dad would sit in the door way.
Every night, he’d tell us a story about a boy
and a girl who were very much
like my brother and me, only they lived
amongst the dinosaurs. I don’t remember
how the stories went, but I remember
how I loved them, how my father’s voice
became part of the night, how everything
always turned out right for the kids
in the story. How much I wanted
to be that girl who rode on a pterodactyl,
and how grateful I felt to be the girl I was,
snug under the thin blue blanket,
our small room a cave where anything
could happen, the low tones of my father
quietly cradling me toward sleep.
New Book, Hush, Available Now!
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged book, Hush on June 19, 2020| 10 Comments »
“Here Rosemerry shows us how one might endeavor to be the peace we want in the world. One comes away remembering that tending is at the heart of all healing. Because thorn bush. Because great blue heron. Because puddles.”
— Wendy Videlock, author of Nevertheless
My new book, Hush, is just out! Winner of the Halcyon Prize for a collection of poems about human ecology, it’s a book-long love song to humanity and the natural world. It’s driven by curiosity and a willingness to dance in the unknown. The poems celebrate the broken, the lowly, the humble, the parched, the lost–and find beauty at every turn. And it features a fabulous foreword by Craig Childs, author of Virga and Bone, Apocalyptic Planet and The Secret Knowledge of Water.
You can see the book and purchase it on my website–and I will sign it for you! Or of course you can order it from your local bookseller (please support them) or from Amazon.
And you can hear me read a few poems from it in this reading I did a few weeks ago with Danusha Laméris and James Crews.
I totally believe in giving poems away—as you know—and I will continue to send you poems every day. AND, I would really appreciate it if you would support this poetry practice by purchasing a book. It would mean a lot to me.
Also, if you do order Hush, I would really appreciate it if you would consider writing a review for it on Goodreads or Amazon.
If you want to set up a reading for your organization, send me a note!
love, Rosemerry
“With Hush, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer once again turns her attention toward insights gleaned from daily life, trusting that everything we encounter, from evergreens and bluebonnets to snapdragons and an achy back after shoveling snow, has something to teach us about being human. Throughout each of these exquisite, open-hearted, often sensual poems, she brings us along as she finds a kind of “renegade beauty” wherever she looks. “Let’s go outside,” she writes, “and praise/the light till the light is gone, and then praise the dark,” modeling for us just the kind of radical gratitude we need in our literature, and in our lives right now.”
— James Crews, editor of Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection
Ravenous
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged food, friendship, love on June 18, 2020| 1 Comment »
Perhaps I was already full
when Danny offered me
a sweet potato pancake
for breakfast, but there
he was with a bowl
of homemade batter
and a cast iron frying pan
hot on the stove, and so
I did what I longed to do,
I said yes, yes to feeding
a hunger that has little
to do with food—
the hunger for someone else
to offer you something
they’ve made, the joy of sharing
a meal together, the honor
of being served. The fact
that the pancake was delicious—
both sweet and hot—
was a bonus. The salsa
he handed me fiery—
fantastic as long friendship,
fierce as gratitude, as love.
Making It Right: A Prophesy
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged being right, love, prophesy, tolerance on June 17, 2020| 2 Comments »
The duty of a musician is for us to take anything that happens on stage and make it part of the music.
—Herbie Hancock, Master Class
No wrong notes in jazz, said the musician
and the poet insisted, no wrong words.
No wrong leaf, said the tree,
and field said, no wrong grass.
No wrong time, promised the friend
and the river said, no wrong rock.
And the heart said, no wrong love,
but the mind said, no, that’s wrong.
And the wrong love replanted itself like grass
and grew wild in all the wrong places
like a gorgeous weed, like a tap-rooted song
until the whole field was beautifully wrong, wrong.
One Hopeful
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged flower, lilac, patience on June 17, 2020| Leave a Comment »
It Takes (Almost) Everything
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged change, stillness, wind on June 15, 2020| 2 Comments »
The wind, every day now, the
wind, the wind, the clamorous
wind, it lifts my dress and whips
my hair, the riotous wind, it
steals my words, unwinds my thoughts, the
demanding wind, the wilding wind, wind
that spreads fire, wind that unbranches the
cottonwood trees, the wind, the wind unlayers
me, invites me to find someplace still in me,
the wind, the relentless wind.
But No Hiding
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged fire, wildfire on June 13, 2020| 5 Comments »
It is the job
of the wildfire
to crave ignition,
to seek more fuel,
to turn at the whim
of the wind.
The wildfire’s job
is to burn
whatever it meets,
to incite it to flame,
to not care what it chars
how it ashes.
I want to not see it
as it leaps and claims,
want to not smell it
as it fills my lungs,
becomes me,
want to not notice
the part of me
ready to burn.
Walking in the Garden
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged garden, self, self worth on June 12, 2020| 14 Comments »
Every morning I walk into the garden,
even when there is little to see—only rows
of tiny sprouts and the earth just beginning to crack.
It is not so much that I speak to the seedlings,
though I do—to the slender green lashes
of carrots and the heart-shaped leaves of beans.
It is more that they speak to me in syllables
I feel through my fingers—speak of resilience
and tenderness, speak of the dark and beautiful
earth. There are so many days when I worry
that I am not doing enough—worry
that I could be more kind, more generous,
more loving, more vocal, more good.
But in the garden, pulling bindweed
and clover and salsify from the mostly empty rows,
all of my brokenness feels less broken.
It is somehow easier to forgive myself
for being who I am. And to mean it.
Easier to know myself as one of many.
Easier to believe that like the potato greens
I have so much more to offer that
can’t yet be seen, but it’s growing,
surely, deep in the darkness, it’s growing.