the day flooded with worry,
I become sailboat—
your words the wind
Archive for August, 2023
One Encouragement
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, encouragement, friendship, sailboat, worry on August 30, 2023| 12 Comments »
Aftermath
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, flowers, kindness on August 29, 2023| 10 Comments »
Those seeds you planted
in me with your words—
all through the night they rooted,
grew stems, sprouted leaves.
By morning, I’m in full bloom,
my thoughts a rebellion of petals,
a mutiny of beauty
where once only shadows spread.
All day, your words unfold
in layers of purples and unruly golds.
I like it when people stare—
everywhere I go, I share this:
the aftermath of your kindness.
Holding Your Heart
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, heart, love, touch, tree on August 29, 2023| 7 Comments »
I want to trace the rings of your heart
the way I would trace tree rings—
not to count them
but to honor each season of you.
I want to touch my fingertips
to your scars, want to learn
your heart’s stories, find clues
of how you became who you are.
I want to press my palms
to your heart and praise
how it is we grow,
even in disaster, even in drought,
want to praise the dark center,
the time-thick bark, the record
of the ordinary days. I want
to chart the thin slivers of your wounds
and let my hands speak love,
want to tell you in a language
of quiet touch, I see you.
Sunday Afternoon
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, mother, pond, present moment, summer on August 27, 2023| 7 Comments »
Balanced together on a paddleboard
my daughter and I float across the pond.
Already we’ve splashed and tipped
and swum and squealed. Already
we’ve followed dozens of blue dragonflies
with our eyes and greeted
the crawdads that cling to the reeds.
We’ve wrestled and tussled
and dunked and dried and now
we lie on our backs and glide
in the late August sun
and warmth seeps into our skin.
She tells me stories, and my eyes are closed,
and I think, This is why I am alive.
And if the moment is somehow made sweeter
because we’ve been intimate with death,
that is something seen only in retrospect.
In the moment, we are sunbeam and story
and the tickle of damselflies
that land on our skin. We are the aimless drift
from light to light.
When It Rains
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cloud, opening, prayer, rain, unease on August 27, 2023| 9 Comments »
When a cloud follows me
as if we are tethered,
can I find peace with the shade?
It’s easy to wish it away.
Can I wish it away
and at the same time
tilt my head back,
keep my eyes wide
and breathe?
These are the days
I learn to pray—
pray not for what I want,
but to be opened
by what is here.
When My Friend Asks Me a Difficult Question
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged langauge, truth, water lily, words on August 25, 2023| 9 Comments »
I close my eyes
as if the truth might rise
from the dark
the way leaves
of water lilies
float greenly at the edge
of two worlds.
When the words do come,
I taste shine in them.
Now I don’t want to speak
in any language
that doesn’t open like lilies,
nourished by depths,
encouraged by light.
The Night of My First Kiss
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dark praise, first kiss, video poem on August 25, 2023| Leave a Comment »
Remember when you first felt a tug of desire? “With Red Thread” is a track on DARK PRAISE, a spoken-word album that honors the dark and how it opens us to creativity, passion, intimacy, revelation, dreaming, receptivity, self-discovery and connection. As I explore in this poem, there are ways the dark sets the stage for intimacy–in this case, a first kiss. You can purchase the whole album here. You can listen to it and download it for free on Spotify or iTunes or wherever you listen to music. And you can see all the videos we’ve released so far on my youtube channel here. Thanks to my amazing guitar player partner Steve Law who produced the album. Please share the video and listen to the songs!
Poetry by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Music by Steve Law
Art by Marisa S. White
Video by Tony Jeannette
New Epoch for the Heart
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dragonfly, evolution, heart, resilience on August 24, 2023| 5 Comments »
I think of how the narrow blue bodies
of the dragonfly ancestors
once skimmed clear lakes—
over a hundred million years
before the great diplodocus
came to wade—
how they flew through the Permian,
the Cretaceous, through mornings,
through meteors, through floods,
through to the Holocene, to now.
How much change they have seen
before coming to balance here
on the reeds beside me,
their bodies like thin blue proofs
of resilience, endurance, constancy.
Meanwhile, the sun is disappearing
below the horizon.
Meanwhile this heart, too,
is learning to adapt, to become
something as surprising as beauty
that survives great challenge,
something as durable, as delicate
as gossamer wings.
Happy Birthday, Suzi! This one’s for you!!!
This Land
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged clothes, ekphrasis, grief, wilderness on August 23, 2023| 8 Comments »
Grieving is a wilderness.
—Tara Brach, “Being with Love, Death and Grief,” July 13, 2023
Grieving is a wilderness I wear,
a long flaring coat
with cuffs of deep water
and hems lined with deserts
and birds that migrate
across my chest.
As soon as I think grief is one thing,
it’s another, vast expanses
with no known paths—
cracks to fall through,
cliffs to climb.
Sometimes, I slip from grief’s heavy silks,
and gaze at it as if it’s art.
There is terror in its folds.
But with buttes of gold
and storm-blue skies,
grief is also, my god,
so beautiful.
Writing Into Paradox
Posted in Uncategorized on August 23, 2023| 2 Comments »
A conversation/class hosted by Laurie Wagner of 27 Powers
Live Online, Monday, August 28, 2023 (9-10:30 Mountain Time)
We live in a paradoxical world, and are being asked more and more to hold the complexity of these times; natural beauty meets climate change, meets wars and newborn babies, and everything we hope for meets everything we fear. How as people do we make sense of these opposing truths? How as writers can we expand the way we hold these realities so that we can write into their complexity and represent the world as it is, with eyes wide open?
In our session, Rosemerry will talk about:
- Why poetry and all of our writing need opposition.
- She’ll teach us how to use paradox in our writing so that we can face the page in a more honest, more complex way, and so we can write about what it really means to be alive.
- We will look at examples of paradox in our work.
- Rosemerry will lead us into some writing that invites us to see the complexities in our lives and bring them alive on the page.
The effect of paradox on the page and in the body is spaciousness. In the poem it says, this is how it is to be alive.
To register, visit here.
Cost: $37
PLEASE NOTE: For those who can’t make the live call or who want to review, the video replay will be sent within 24 hours of the live call.
Freedom Night
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged fear, shame, spaciousness, speaking, truth, words on August 23, 2023| 4 Comments »
All those words
I was afraid to say,
I gave them wings—
dark ink black wings—
and watched them
fly away, watched them
dive and circle,
swoop and soar,
enchanted by their flight.
The cage of shame
I’d kept them in,
it disappeared,
till all that was left
in me was sky.
What Holds Things Together
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged entropy, love, rangers, winter, yosemite on August 21, 2023| 10 Comments »
for Karen, Lindsay, Sarah, and the other Rangers and Volunteers in Tuolomne Meadows
Marcelo says he’s interested in fasteners,
in nails. He likes thinking about how things
hold together. He’s a carpenter and a poet,
and it follows, his fascination with structure.
Because I am me, I think about love.
I think of the ranger station I saw at Yosemite,
the roof collapsed by heavy snows. I think
of the heap of picnic tables I saw,
metal legs twisted like pipe cleaners,
unable to hold up the weight of long winter.
Things fall apart. And yet.
I think of the rangers who love this place,
who return every year to shovel, to teach,
to clean, to rebuild, to organize, to guide—
their devotion essential as any screws,
as any glue, as mighty as high alpine weather.
Love, the force resilient enough
as the world falls apart
to hold what’s been broken together.
The Day Before the Hurricane
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged being present, nature, yosemite on August 21, 2023| 4 Comments »
Tuolomne Meadows, Yosemite
The meadow is a vast embrace for light
and does not prepare for predicted rain.
White slabs of granite gather warmth
in their mass with no thought
of storm, and for a sun-drunk moment,
unshackled from purpose,
I’m undone from myself,
more becoming, less someone,
less trajectory, more field,
more attention to cinquefoil, dragonfly,
thin sweetness of mountain air.
In loving the world that is, I am exactly here
Buzz of fly. Beat of heart. Path of ant.
Beat of heart. Dry needles. Dry moss.
Beat of heart. Beat of heart.
Sage. Beat of heart. Stone. Beat
of heart. Deep spring. Tall pine.
Beat of heart. Beat of heart.
One Way to See One of the Most Beautiful Places in the World
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, dark, driving, vacation, yosemite on August 21, 2023| 4 Comments »
The rental car headlights shine
on parallel white and yellow lines
as they curve and hairpin
and scale and wind
through moonless forests
and unlit glades. Beyond them,
I feel what I cannot see—
abysses that yawn beyond vision—
and I climb, and I climb,
I cling to my lines. I attend
the soft hymns of my daughter’s breath,
my husband’s breath.
Somewhere out there, a great
granite dome. Somewhere
out there, a meadow
with bubbling soda springs.
Somewhere, a valley
with hundreds of thousands of gallons
of clear water pluming and pouring,
a glorious roaring.
For hours, we twist through
invisible cliffs, my eyes trained
to the pavement before us.
Sometimes, a pinecone.
Sometimes, a branch. Sometimes,
a white flash of headlights.
I follow the lines as they turn,
as they swerve. We arrive
at a small room across the pass
with only the beauty we are.
Back from Yosemite
Posted in Uncategorized on August 21, 2023| 6 Comments »
Hi friends–
sorry for the radio silence for four days–it was a WHIRLWIND trip to Yosemite, in which my husband and daughter and I had SO MUCH FUN, even as (in part because) things were, um, crazy, and include airport closures, leaving a phone on the plane, leaving Fresno at midnight to drive four hours through Yosemite over Tioga Pass in the dark to arrive at our hotel at 4 a.m., my daughter had food poisoning and was up all night sick, and returning to Fresno to wake up at 3:30 a.m. for our flight home … sooooooo you see why I wasn’t sending out poems!!!
But here they are …
and now we return to our regularly scheduled daily sending of poems!!
Hugs to you,
Rosemerry
One Remembering
after a four-hour delay
staring out the round window at stars—
forgetting what time is
Il Poggione Brunello di Montalcino, 2004
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged complexity, container, gift, memory, wine on August 17, 2023| 14 Comments »
with thanks to Rae
Inside the glass bottle,
the wine from Sangiovese grapes—
aged in oak barrels for three years—
continues to age,
losing its youthful fruitiness,
becoming more heady,
more sour cherry, more rose.
A glass of such wine is like
a drinkable love letter to change.
So when the sommelier’s wife
gifts me a vintage from the year
my son was born,
I taste more than raspberry,
dried flowers, coconut and tobacco.
I taste deep red.
I taste rolling down grassy hills
and painting our faces with mud.
I taste sleepless nights and midnight fears.
Homework at the table.
Camping in the desert.
The vinosity of devotion.
Late summer swims in the pond.
The glass empty long before
I wish it were done.
Once Upon a Song
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged heart, river, song, tears on August 16, 2023| 14 Comments »
While dancing barefoot in wet grass
with the dark all around us and
the star-bright sky above
and a song in the air and joy
and sorrow crashing through me
in equal force, it is only now
with tears running down my face
I realize the tears themselves
are the river where I can lay down
my burdens, these tears are the stream
that will never run dry, these tears
are the river where I will again
and again and again return to pray,
Oh sister, let’s go down, come on down,
and Hallelujah, at last I know the river
is nowhere if not in my heart,
and if there’s a river here,
then every moment is a baptism,
every moment a chance to be lifted,
to be healed.
One Journey
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged driving, home, journey, travel on August 15, 2023| 3 Comments »
driving three hundred eleven miles—
learning to call every inch of the trip
home
Thank You & a Poem of Surrender
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged amusement park, choice, family, grief, rollercoaster, surrender on August 14, 2023| 21 Comments »
Dear Friends,
It has been two years today since I wrote you to say that we had a family emergency and it would be some time before I wrote again. Several weeks after that I wrote to explain my son Finn, nearly 17, had chosen to take his life. And it was several weeks after that before I began writing the daily poems again. During these two years, I have received so much love, and I thank you. I thank every one of you who has lit a candle, said a prayer, thought good thoughts, did something nice for someone else who was grieving. I thank every one of you who held me and my family in your hearts. I am so grateful. As it is, it’s been the hardest thing I have ever done–meeting this loss. I honor every other person who has lost a beloved. I honor every other heart that has grieved. It is so hard, and without an enormous upswelling of love, I don’t know how anyone would do it. Your words, your thoughts, your blessings have carried me, and I thank you. Thank you for all the letters and notes today and this week–I read every single one out loud. I thank every one of you by name. I am sorry that I am not able to write everyone back individually–your words matter to me. It matters to me that you reach back. It matters to me that you let me know the poems matter to you. Thank you. Thank you. I can’t imagine doing this without your support.
Today our family decided to honor Finn’s life by going to the amusement park where we had a lot of fun as he was growing up–and one of my friends pointed out after we’d made our plan, “Life’s a rollercoaster,” and isn’t that an apt metaphor.
As you ride your own rollercoasters, friends, I wish that you, too, feel carried by love. I wish that peace finds you and makes a home in you.
with love,
Rosemerry
Riding Rollercoasters on a Difficult Day
The moment we entered the queue
for The Boomerang, we already knew
we’d be turned upside down and whirled around,
and by the time our chests were restrained
in our seats, we knew we’d consented to free fall,
to be shaken and twisted and then do it all again
backwards, but it wasn’t until the ride began,
clackity, clackity, clackity, clackity, clackity
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
it was only then, when we laughed
the whole time we screamed,
it was only then we surrendered.
The Swirl
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged death, dream, grief, son on August 13, 2023| 29 Comments »
We’re traveling together, you,
me, your father, your sister. And
we’re laughing. You’re talking
about your classes for college,
and you’re nervous about seeing
a girl again, and I have this bright feeling
that you’ve passed some threshold.
You’re a firecracker, wild with potential,
and I can’t understand this swirl of worry
that churns through me like smoke.
It’s only after you race down the concourse
showing off your speed,
arms pumping, legs a blur,
your body quick and slender verb,
it’s only then when you don’t come back
I remember you already made a choice to die,
and in the dream I wail, battered again
by the bludgeon of immediate loss.
When I wake, I’m still wearing
the sweet perfume of promise and hope,
even as tears slip hot to the sheets.
It’s not easy, today, to rise, to step
into this world of heartache and courage,
this world you left, this world I love.