Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for June, 2022

Earth Words: An Online Poetry Thoughtshop

Posted in Uncategorized on June 21, 2022| Leave a Comment »


Wednesday, June 22, 6-6:45 p.m. mountain time

Reading and writing poems about the natural world can invite a deeper relationship with the earth and teach us so much about what it means to be alive. In this 45-minute webinar-style thoughtshop, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer will share poems about the natural world and its flora and fauna—poems that help us pay attention, or as Rumi would say, open the sail, so we can keep our hearts and heads where our bodies are, returning us to the present moment again and again. With each poem she shares and discusses, Rosemerry will offer prompts for participants to write their own poems that explore their relationships to the world around them.

Hosted by SHFYT at Mile High, this program is held on zoom. once you register, you will receive a link. After the event, participants receive a link to the video, plus links to find all the poems.

To purchase a ticket: When you click register, you will be prompted to create an online account with Mindbody. Simply use your email and a password you would like to use. If you have an account but forgot your password, select “forgot password” and follow the prompts. 

If you have any issues signing up, please call us at (720) 486-9798. Beth will get back to you within 48 hours and always by the day of the workshop.

Read Full Post »

Small Stuff

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on June 21, 2022| 8 Comments »




It can be so small, what saves me.
   Like the crow that arrives every day
     in the same green spot in the yard.
Like the baby bunny that lives
   beneath our porch who locks eyes
     with me every morning.
Like skinny dipping with Corinne
   in a frigid alpine lake. Bite of radish
     just picked from the garden.
Scent of wild roses on the trail.
   It does not make sense that pleasures
     so small could somehow stand up
to a ransacked heart, and yet
   when I hear the whir of hummingbird wings
     or see the tiny purple of a Lady Slipper
rising out of the dirt,
   I notice the dogged joy in me,
     how it glimmers against the dark
like the shooting star I saw tonight,
   long and brilliant and red,
     or like the owl in the spruce trees
that with only a handful
   of low and sonorous notes,
     redefines the night with song.

Read Full Post »

The First Father’s Day Without Your Father

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on June 20, 2022| 8 Comments »




Perhaps you listen again and again
to his favorite song. Maybe you look
at photos of him and remember
birthdays and Tuesdays and boat trips
and snuggling on the couch.
Maybe you reach out to touch his head,
miss the soft fuzz of his buzz cut.
You might light a candle and say his name
as you have nearly every day since he died.
Of course, he loved “What a Wonderful World.”
And the world is wonderful, though damn,
what you wouldn’t give to hear him
say your name or your nickname,
to hear the sunshine in his voice—
how it touches your heart like sunrise on water.
You might walk out into the night
and converse with the stars as if he were listening.
Maybe you feel the strangest infusion of love,
as if your arms are tingling
and your chest is tingling
and you can’t explain it
but your whole body’s humming.
Perhaps you cry, but there is no way to know
what percentage of the tears is sadness
and what percentage is gratitude.
Perhaps you think of all the other daughters and sons
who have lost their fathers
and you open your heart to their loss.
You decide, again, to honor him
by living a life he’d be proud of.
Your father, perhaps you think
of the last day you saw him alive,
how he lifted his hands,
his eyes tracking something you couldn’t see.
Perhaps you practice remembering him—
his laughter, his fury, his advice, his silence—
and you notice how, each time you practice,
he is so close to you, as close as breath.

Read Full Post »

There Are Many Ways to Hold Space

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on June 19, 2022| 10 Comments »


 
This morning I painted
a wooden marker for your grave—
a slender plank to hold the space
until the stone arrives.
I wanted it to be perfect,
but I am not a painter.
I am a mother painting
a wooden marker
for the grave of her son,
but there is devotion
in the uneven blue coat,
devotion in the crooked silver lettering,
devotion in every brush stroke of white.
In the movie of me,
I watched as the lens zoomed in
on my awkward hands
to show their slow and loyal work.
Then the frame widened
to include the quiet rooms in the house,
widened more to comprise the summer field,
then panned and tilted to the sky
to show the gathering rain.
After the fade to gray,
I was still here, sitting at the table,
paint on my dress,
my life not a movie but my life—
every day the chance to live into it.
I flashed back to sitting
at this same table
where you learned to write your letters,
then learned to write your name.
Fast forwarded through thousands
of family dinners.
Flashed to this morning
as I finished the grave marker,
shaping the letters of your name through tears.
Though a camera couldn’t show it,
I forgave myself
for not being a better painter.
I told myself I did the best I could.
It was hours before the rain began to fall.

Read Full Post »

New Dream

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on June 17, 2022| 8 Comments »




Why do I resist this room
with its wall of windows,
its low-angled light,
the tables all laden
with apples and mangos
and long braids of bread?
Why do I feel myself
leaning away
from miraculous abundance,
white linen cloths,
and pale yellow bouquets?
This cake is sweet
but I cannot taste it.
Surrounded by food,
I have a different hunger.
Surrounded with lushness,
I feel a different need.
Sometimes what the heart
most craves is
nothing—
the fast between the feasts,
the spaciousness
filled only by love.
I am not afraid
of emptiness.
I need what I need,
and it’s spare.
Thank you for the feast—
I don’t mean to be ungrateful.
There is beauty, too,
in barrenness.
I don’t want to fill
this hole.

Read Full Post »

When I First Read Molly Bloom’s Soliloquy in James Joyce’s Ulysses

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on June 17, 2022| 4 Comments »


            a musing on Bloomsday, June 16


That was the first time
I fully understood
the sway of yes—
how what Joyce called
“the female word”
could seduce, could affirm,
could acquiesce,
could mountain flower,
could undress a grown man,
could slowly caress
others’ tenderest parts,
could trespass like perfume,
could rewrite the past.
Joyce said it signaled
“the end of all resistance,”
and I who tried
to be good, to be tame,
to do right, read Molly
and lusted to be
the one in the red yes
who lives with abandon
and recklessness,
and yes, I thought, yes
I could live into yes,
I slipped into the word
like a silken digression,
and thirty years later,
I still dream in yes,
my heart beating mad,
a riotous clash
when I yes, pulse with yes
did it enter you, too,
this radiant yes,
beating yes,
oh this yes.

Read Full Post »

Something Worth Sharing

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on June 16, 2022| 9 Comments »

inspired by Eternity’s Gate by Vincent van Gogh and a piano composition by the same name by Kayleen Asbo, with quotes from van Gogh’s writings about the painting


Perhaps you, too, have sat
in the corner of a room,
back bent like winter grass,
elbows on your knees,
head weighty in your hands.
Spent. Exhausted.
Unsure how to live
another minute.
This is perhaps
the moment
we least want to be seen,
but if we are lucky,
perhaps an artist
with an eye for eternity
will feel it his duty
to find in our ruin
something precious,
something noble,
something unutterably moving
something to help us
know ourselves
as a part of infinity,
our life a brief song,
unbearably beautiful,
a masterpiece,
dark and descending
though it is.   

Read Full Post »

One Inner Reordering

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , on June 15, 2022| 2 Comments »

 
 
hiking to the waterfall
my priorities rearrange themselves
promptness? or bright pink primrose?

Read Full Post »

Before the Burial

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on June 14, 2022| 13 Comments »


Because I can, I carry the box with your ashes
around the house as if you’re a baby on my hip.
I point out things and explain them,
just as I did when you were young and alive.
There, I say, there is where you practiced piano.
Here, I say, is where you sat at the counter
and wept when I told you the story
of Cinderella. And here is the wall
where we hung all your artwork.
And here is the room where you slept.
Here’s the plant you gave me last year—
see how it’s doubled in size?
And here’s the new couch in the place
where the old couch once was,
the one on which we snuggled each morning
before school. I walk the floor as I did
when you were young and fussy and needed
touch and movement to calm you.
Now I am the one who is calmed by the walking.
So familiar, these steps around the kitchen island,
these steps around the table.
So familiar, this weight on my hip.
Soon we will place this small wooden box
in the ground, so while I still can, I carry you.
Oh sweetheart, how is it I’m thriving amidst this gravity?
It is, I am sure, because I, too, am deeply companioned,
carried from moment to moment, from space to space.
And though I don’t hear it, there is perhaps a voice
that says to me, Here is where you lit
a candle every day. Here is where you practiced
to love in new ways. And here is where
you did not judge yourself as you wept.
Here is the place where you did nothing but breathe.
And here is where you thought of all the people
who have carried you.
And here is where you said thank you.

Read Full Post »

Can’t Get Rid of It

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on June 13, 2022| 4 Comments »


with a line from Albert Huffstickler, “The Cure”


The oregano escaped the garden
almost twenty years ago
and now it grows in such abundance
I mow it with the rest of the field grass—
oh wild scent of earth and mint,
a feral goodness, an untamable joy.
It always grows back, only more so.
It’s like the memories of you
that now grow so rampant
they help define the field.
I could never contain them
or eradicate them,
nor would I try—not even
the memories that hurt.
I am willing to meet what hurts—
it’s so like oregano. Pungent.
strong, astringent, too much
when encountered alone,
but when blended, it’s a bitterness
that enhances the world.
How strange that what hurts us
can nourish us.
How strange our lives are recast by grief—
a gradual transformation,
ordinary as the field,
natural as a leaf.

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »