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Archive for September, 2025


September 24, 2025 6-7 mountain time
zoom, recorded
sliding scale

How do we live fully in the face of catastrophe? Last night I read this quote from Puerto Rican poet Aurora Levins Morales, and I thought, THAT. That is what I am hoping to do with this program: “The world is in great danger from runaway greed. The only thing that can stop it is large numbers of people becoming able to imagine and then create something better. … Because once we truly imagine it, the pull to create it becomes irresistible.”

Let’s imagine together. In this hour-long webinar-style program, I will share poems that help keep our eyes and hearts open to it all, poems that help us turn toward the horror and find a way forward. I will then offer invitations for you to do your own writing later–if you wish. Or just come to listen to brave, heart-opening poems. There will be time for questions and responses. After the event, all who register will receive a link to the recording, links to the poems I read, plus the writing invitations. For more info and to register, visit here

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Every day I fasten
my heart to yours.
with invisible strings,
strings so light
you might almost forget
they are there
until you start falling
from any edge
like disappointment,
like betrayal, like
forgetting you belong.
The strings don’t
keep you from falling—
that’s just not
how it works.
Nor could I ever
control you with them
like some well-
intentioned puppeteer.
But feel that tug?
It’s my heart
reminding yours
we’re connected.
And remember those
simple phones we made
with string and two cups?
When you need me,
make of your heart
a cup. I will do the same.
I may not catch
all the words,
but I’ll feel them
with you, wherever
you are, I’ll
feel them.

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I want to hear America singing
all those varied carols you mentioned.
But it’s noise now, Walt, more shouting 
than song. As if volume makes a leader.
Any singer knows being louder
just makes discord, and harmony
needs constant attunement
to every other singer.
I want to hear America listening.
Want a citizen chorus that knows
our voices are only as good as our ears.
I want a new song that begins
with a silence that stretches 
from sea to shining sea—
the kind of silence that holds
every one of us, every part of us.
And when the many parts do arise, 
glorious in their differences,
I want to hear inside them 
the careful attention that tunes
them to each other, I want to hear 
in our song the deep listening that makes
even the most uncomfortable dissonance 
beautiful.

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You never know what someone else is going through.

Please—share this video. With a friend. With your family. With a colleague. 

RISKING LOVE audio by Steve Law. Video by Holiday Mathis. Poem by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer. To purchase RISKING LOVE, visit here. 
Spotify: here   Deezer: here   Pandora: here   Apple Music: here   YouTube Music: here

To see all the videos on the album visit here.

“Watching My Friend Pretend Her Heart Isn’t Breaking” is the fifteenth and final track on RISKING LOVE, a spoken-word album that explores how we might fall more deeply in love with the world as it is, even when that seems impossible.

Watching My Friend Pretend Her Heart Isn’t Breaking

On Earth, just a teaspoon of neutron star
would weigh six billion tons. Six billion tons
equals the collective weight of every animal
on earth. Including the insects. Times three.
Six billion tons sounds impossible
until I consider how it is to swallow grief—
just a teaspoon and one might as well have consumed
a neutron star. How dense it is,
how it carries inside it the memory of collapse.
How difficult it is to move then.
How impossible to believe that anything
could lift that weight.
There are many reasons to treat each other
with great tenderness. One is
the sheer miracle that we are here together
on a planet surrounded by dying stars.
One is that we cannot see what
anyone else has swallowed.

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, from All the Honey (Samara Press, 2023)

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One Permanence


 
 
they’ve become us now,
integral as bone, as skin
these stains of love

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If there is a door in aloneness,
I want to be brave enough
to stand in aloneness and not
try to walk through that door
in a fruitless attempt to escape
the discomfort of feeling alone.
How many times have I rushed
to try to make things feel okay
instead of staying with the ache?
If there is a door in aloneness,
perhaps it is fashioned
from being vulnerable enough
to feel alone, to surrender to this,
and then it’s not so much
that the door opens, more
that aloneness itself becomes
the key to encountering
an infinite communion.
All along there was nothing
to do and no one to be.
All along, everything was here.
 

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to grow a heart from lake water and an old
junk yard, from an empty classroom
and cheap novels bought at the second
 
hand store, two-liter bottles of diet coke
and a dusty dead-end road. There was more,
of course. An old plaid couch with a squeaky spring.
 
The spiraling cord of an old telephone. A rusty pan
with cornbread made with Mavis’s fresh eggs.
The breathing weight of my newborn girl.
 
What hasn’t gone into the growing of this heart?
An old red truck. The pinnately compound leaves
of Jacob’s Ladder. But it is the unpetaling
 
that astonishes now, how all the stories
of my becoming—all the particulars
that seemed so essential—begin to drop
 
No, not drop, exactly. It’s just that I nourish
these stories less as I turn my attention
toward the vastness from which all arose—
 
and in this turning, discover how the more
the heart is undone, the more
the heart can grow.

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Writing into the Pain of the World
September 24, 2025 6-7 mountain time
zoom, recorded
sliding scale

When the whole world seems to be in upheaval, why on earth would we write poems? In this hour-long webinar-style program, Rosemerry will share poems that help keep our eyes and hearts open to it all, poems that help us turn toward the horror and find a way forward. She will then offer invitations for you to do your own writing later. There will be time for questions and responses. After the event, all who register will receive a link to the recording, links to the poems she reads, plus the writing invitations. For more info and to register, visit here

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Writing into the Paradox of Holding and Letting Go
October 16-17
zoom, $175, no recording

 
Please join us for a one-and-a-half-day poetry retreat as we explore through reflection and writing what life is asking of us during these times—holding on, letting go—while turning to the natural world as our inspiration and guide. We will nurture a trustworthy space to invite in an exploration of our relationship with this paradox. What happens when we deeply draw our attention to our surroundings, listen to our bodies and hearts, and look to nature as our teacher?  How does it shift things for us? Through the Courage & Renewal approach and poetry writing and exploration, this offering invites you to connect with yourself and others—to slow down, reflect and notice, while experiencing poetry through the gateways of listening, creative writing, imagination, and shared exploration. With the discoveries we make, we can then appreciate—and capture in writing—the way in which we might be able to hold on and let go, all at once.
 
Writing into the Paradox of Holding On and Letting Go will be grounded in the Courage & Renewal® approach which you can learn more about in Parker J. Palmer’s book, A Hidden Wholeness. All are welcome.
For more information and to register, visit here.

Risk and Play: Flirting with the Unknown
October 23
5-7 p.m. mountain time
hosted by Kripalu
Zoom, recorded
$29

 
As part of Kripalu’s Fourth Annual Fall Writing Program, Rosemerry joins other esteemed writers Julia Cameron, Asif Ullah, Eric Maisel, and many more. The overall theme: Imagine New Worlds: Hope, Transformation and Exploration. Rosemerry’s class is Risk and Play: Flirting with the Unknown: Let curiosity and uncertainty drive your writing into fresh, resonant new regions. We’ll read poems that make us laugh, shake our heads, open our hearts and show up, and then in that vein, we’ll write. Play is a secret weapon for meeting failure, vulnerability, uncertainty, and humility. REGISTER HERE

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Grace in Transition: Poetry as a bridge between the everyday & the sacred
Thursdays, October 30-Nov. 13
noon-2 p.m. mountain time
hosted by The Sanctuary in Ireland
Zoom, recorded
€75 (around $87)

Reading and writing poems can be a transformative art that helps us weave together the gritty particulars of our daily lives and the ethereal truths we glimpse in our spiritual practices. But it’s not the poems themselves that create the connective tissue, it’s the process of cultivating curiosity and opening to reflection. In this process-forward three-week playshop, we’ll practice self-compassion, wonder, and embodied attentiveness as we read, write and converse about poems. For more information or to register visit here

If you appreciate receiving these free daily poems, please consider offering support through Buy Me a Coffee, venmo (rosemerry-trommer) or zelle (rosemerryt@gmail.com)

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The Holding  


 
The way the shore holds the pond,
that is how I want to hold
the pain in my heart, honoring
how vital it is. How it is home
to things with hard shells and sharp
claws and also to beings with gossamer
wings. To drain it would be to lose
my aliveness. To become barren,
cracked, dry. I can’t say I love
the spider-like skaters that streak
across the top, nor the thick gray muck
that lines the bottom. But I love
the green rushes that rim the edges,
the red-stemmed willows, the wild
iris. It is no easy thing to hold pain,
but I look how vibrant the pond shore is.
This alive is how I want to live.

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I bring with me the face of the mother I saw on the news,
the one whose shoulders shuddered as a friend
led her from the scene. I bring the ugliness
of the words I read on Facebook, black letters
on a red screen preaching rage and retaliation.
I bring the hollow cheeked boy wearing blue
greasy clothes and the smudged white body bag,
and together we drive through the canyon
where the river is swollen from last night’s rain
and the tops of cottonwoods are just beginning
to turn golden. We don’t say anything as we rise
into the valley to see mountain peaks sleeved in white.
A small bear stands on the side of the road
on his back legs, dragging acorns into his mouth
with both upper paws. A slate blue cloud
smudges the distant sky and every branch, every
rock, every bumper, every porch sparkles
in morning sun. How do we metabolize it all?
Oh body, great receptor, portal for wonder and pain.
Who am I when I step out of the car? Changed.

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