with thanks to Heidi
It is not the best raspberry.
There have been berries sweeter,
more perfectly formed,
berries I’ve harvested
warm from the bush,
berries that have made me
close my eyes and rhapsodize
about the perfect, juicy,
bulbous joy of raspberry.
Still, this small and fragile fruit
packaged in a plastic shell
sings ripe and red on my tongue,
and on this January morning
it brings news of sunshine somewhere.
I delight in its tartness, its bite.
Bless what is good enough.
Not only bless but cherish—
Cherish this good enough morning
with its good enough fruit
in this kitchen cleaned well enough
for this good enough woman
living into the good enough day,
my mouth slightly puckered,
taste of raspberry still bright
on my tongue.
Archive for January, 2024
Beyond Perfect
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged acceptance, contentment, good enough, imperfection, perfection, raspberry on January 31, 2024| 9 Comments »
The Same Trail, Only Different
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged eagle, friendship, gratefulness, time on January 31, 2024| 4 Comments »
for Michelle
After staring at the eagle
in the barren cottonwood,
I stare at you as you stare at it,
knowing the moment more precious
because we’re together on this river trail
stopping to stare at the white-feathered head,
the sharp yellow beak,
the thrill of the stillness of the bird.
How much of my life
has been better because
I shared it with you?
Heartbreak and gray mud,
surgeries and eighties songs,
short skirts and big hats
and cars with fast engines,
all of it fleeting as the chance
to watch an eagle on a branch,
glorious in part because we know
it will soon fly away.
So much change so fast. This is why
we hold out our arms to each other,
why we bury our noses in the pungent sage.
This is why we laugh until we cry,
cry until we laugh.
It’s the only life we have.
The Wellness Visits
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged doctor, gratefulness, grief on January 30, 2024| 8 Comments »
for Scott
There in the lobby of the shipping store
was the man who for years
measured my son and weighed
my son and checked his lungs, his tongue,
his vision, made sure his knees
swung out when hit with a mallet.
Standing between pallets of cardboard
and the counter piled with tape,
I didn’t mean to blurt out, My son is dead.
Hours later, I wonder if I could have
spared him this blade of truth.
Mostly, I wanted to thank him,
his efforts of the past somehow
even more precious now.
I wanted him to know it matters,
the care he gave. It matters
that he, too, did his best to help the boy
grow strong. It matters, his kindness.
How he helped us feel at ease.
It matters that I have this now:
the memory of a sapling boy
in a thin blue gown sitting tall,
shoulders back, on the edge
of an exam table, looking this man
in the eye with such seriousness,
breathing in, breathing out
as deeply as he can.
Awkward, But
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bird, clumsy, love on January 28, 2024| 4 Comments »
It can be so clumsy,
this loving you.
I wish, sometimes
to love you like a song,
something that soars
and fills you with awe.
Instead, like today,
I seem to love you
like a bird that walks
and hops and bobs
instead of flying
and wheeling high above—
it’s seemingly graceless,
but oh love,
what I want most
is to be close.
Ambush
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged friendship, guns, trauma, triggered on January 28, 2024| 14 Comments »
Hi dear readers,
Before you read this poem, I feel as if i should warn you that it talks about guns and alludes to the trauma that guns can cause. And if this would in any way provoke you, I wanted to give you the chance to not read today’s poem. But it didn’t feel right to leave you poem-less … so here, in case you want a poem that does not mention guns, is one from a year ago today about beets in which no one gets hurt.
Thank you for joining me for this daily practice. I am so grateful you’re in this with me.
Rosemerry
Ambush
It only shoots lasers,
I tell myself as the biathlon
skiers skate by with guns
strapped to their backs,
smiles wide on their faces.
I smile and wave back
and on this most blue
day of winter, I start weeping
in the middle of the perfectly
groomed corduroy track as my
heart falls apart again, because
apparently that’s what this heart
does when reminded what a trigger
can do. Corrine holds me
until the tears slow
and we stand there together
in the spruce and the snow
until I am again exactly here,
in this year, on these skis,
on this day, with this blue,
with this sharp burn of loss,
with this still pulsing love,
with these arms of a friend,
with this heart that after two
years is no less broken. Nor,
I notice, is this heart less whole.
I don’t hear a gunshot,
just as I didn’t then.
I wade into the silence
like a baptism.
Midnight Storm
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dreams vs. reality, lover, nightmare, reality, sleep, storm on January 27, 2024| 4 Comments »
heart thumping fast
as windshield wipers
attempting to keep
the vision clear
in a hurricane,
oh love,
lay your sleep-warm hand
on my sleep-warm leg,
remind me what is dream,
what is real
The Broken Heart Goes Dancing
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bluegrass, dancing, heartbreak, joy, music on January 26, 2024| 8 Comments »
at The Infamous Stringdusters show
Give me a night made of strings,
a night that is plucked
and strummed and bowed and picked,
a night with a driving, ecstatic music
and nothing to do but be danced
by the night as if each string of dobro
and fiddle and bass is attached
to an arm, a foot, a hip,
to the curling edge of an upper lip—
and even the broken heart is tugged
from its chair by bronze-coated strings
until it’s an open and rhythmic thing
that beats for the bliss of it, beats
for the song of it, beats
for the joy-swaying head-shaking lift
of it, beats because that’s what a heart
is for, and for hours the night
pulls every string, and the heart
beats out more, please, more.
Exploring Ordinary Blessings: Reading & Writing from The Wonder of Small Things
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged playshop, The Wonder of Small Things on January 25, 2024| Leave a Comment »
Reading and writing poems offers us fresh lenses with which to re-see our lives. Side effects may include reverence, wonder, connection. And when we read and write poems together, this practice of noticing and sharing can create a generous and thoughtful community that nourishes us in essential, beautiful ways. Join poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer for five weeks of reading poems from The Wonder of Small Things: Poems of Peace & Renewal, edited by James Crews. You will need to buy the book before the class begins. In each class, we will discuss poems from the book, then use them as launching points for our own writing practice. There will be optional sharing at the end of each class. Limited to 12 people per section.
Open to all levels of writing—from never-wrote-a-poem-before to Pulitzer Prize winners.
10 a.m. to noon mountain time
two sections:
Tuesday cohort (Feb 13-March 12)
Wednesday cohort (Feb 14-March 13)
In Conversation
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, conversation, identity, language, love, words on January 25, 2024| 12 Comments »
The sound of your voice
enters me and becomes me—
becomes synapse, becomes pulse,
becomes blood, becomes breath.
And in this way, the more I listen to you,
the more I become you.
It is no small thing to converse.
Sometimes I swim in the wild honey
of your words. Sometimes I break
on their jagged shores.
Some words become pillars that hold up
what is possible.
Others are wrecking balls
that turn to rubble all I thought I knew.
How fleeting it is, any grasp
of who we are. This is why,
hour after month after year
I welcome your words—
I like what they do.
Even when they are not easy to hear,
I love who I become
when I listen to you.
This
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged freedom, spaciousness on January 24, 2024| 8 Comments »
Sit with the freedom in your heart.
Feel it expanding into your palms—
in this moment whole galaxies
seem to fit inside your fingertips. How?
When did you become this vast?
Was this spaciousness always here?
Could you have felt this way yesterday
if only you had gotten out of your own way?
Sit with the freedom in your heart—
more beautiful than any story—
feel it surge through you
until your body forgets any limits
and knows itself as infinite.
Freedom will do what freedom does—
invite you to touch the source of the universe,
replace, for this moment, your fear with awe.