Hi friends,
Thank you for your patience as I took a couple weeks off from sending out poems to spend time with my family. Here are many poems written during the days I was gone. Please go to the bottom to see my interview that came out last week with singer Carrie Newcomer and activist and author Parker J Palmer, and four poems that came out last weekend in ONE ART. And now, we return to sending poems out daily! I missed you!
Rosemerry
Twenty Seven Haikulings from Costa Rica and Nicaragua
How many times have you noticed that it’s the little quiet moments in the midst of life that seem to give the rest extra-special meaning?
—Fred Rogers
it’s not quite doing nothing
this watching sky go from blue
to pink to dark
*
every wave, shell, shoreline, human
breaks and breaks and breaks—
shattering into wholeness
*
as if this time
I’ll finally stand on the board
I paddle again toward shore
*
no word for the way
evening light gathers in the waves—
oh how the nameless shines
*
this moment
a red hibiscus
about to open
*
as he drives his two-oxen cart
on the two-lane highway,
how straight the young man’s back
*
no star tonight
to wish on—
wishing on your eyes
*
walking the long sand beach
silent and hand in hand
gloriously alive with heartache
*
with each laughing failure to stand
on a board in the surf
I am somehow more myself
*
the way the ocean leaves a shell on the sand
then rushes up to grab it back
I don’t quite let you go
*
thrilling in the drum
of each exultant wave,
dog-earring the silence after
*
slipping my hand
beneath the memory of his hand
I tether myself here
*
at the same time
we travel through the Nicaraguan forest
the Baltimore Oriole and I
*
aimless, barefoot days
anchored by love
thousands of miles away
*
white scent of jasmine
slipping between branches
this talking to the dead
*
yes, I tumbled again,
but oh, for a few moments
the ocean carried me as I stood
*
with molten thread
the magma, red and pulsing,
stitches me into its heartbeat
*
momenting, orchiding
lushing, dusking, realing, kinning,
nothinging, everythinging,
*
watching the sloth
not move for hours
no fine print
*
in the old cathedral in Granada
I breathe in five hundred years of prayers
breathe out one more
*
leaving the sleeve
of my skin to become for an hour
a wave
*
at the base of the great blue wet cathedral
a plaque written in cursive—
hermit crab trails in the sand
*
whisper of shells scraping
as each wave recedes,
scratching the back of eternity
*
hidden in the dried tamarind pod
a love note written
in sweet amber goo
*
the sloth I saw this morning
surely still draped on the same branch
as my airplane lifts its nose
*
such a patient
homeland—
silence
*
losing the self
let me be surpassed
by love for this world
—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Four Poems Published in ONE ART
What should you do if an alligator chases you? What is your current hyperfixation? How can looking out the window save your life? And what do you do when someone compliments you on your costume? These are the themes of the four poems that came out in ONE ART: a journal of poetry. I hope they make you laugh and feel a little warmer and lighter …
The Growing Edge Podcast
It was incredible to be in conversation with two of my heart heroes, singer and poet Carrie Newcomer and author, activist and educator Parker J Palmer, and oh, such a conversation! I love The Growing Edge podcast, filled with humor and sorrow and outrage and openness. We talk about the role of the artist in difficult times, why poems matter, and the importance of showing up–on the page, on the street, and in our own lives. And also, we talk a lot about saying no–which is, it turns out, my growing edge. Listen Here.