There comes a day when a woman knows
she’s more Mother Superior than Maria—
and though she spent decades dreaming
of spinning on stage singing The hills are alive,
she now knows she’s more likely
to be cast standing in a habit, clutching a rosary,
singing Climb every mountain.
How many dreams pass us
before we realize they’ve gone?
Already I know I will never climb Everest,
will not be an Olympic Nordic skier,
will not research the cure for AIDS.
Every day I am less the woman I dreamt I would be
and more the woman I am—
which is, apparently, a woman who sits in the balcony
to see “The Sound of Music” and drives home happy,
still singing about how her heart
wants to beat like the wings of the birds that rise
from the lake to the trees.
A woman who is learning how,
now that her dreams have faded,
she can be more present than ever.
Posts Tagged ‘aging’
Still Singing
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, musical, self, singing, Sound of Music, theater on October 24, 2022| 7 Comments »
Still Learning
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, butterfly, learning, story on December 9, 2021| 9 Comments »
Tonight when I see a photo
of myself from almost thirty years ago,
I stare at the woman in white lace
the way a butterfly might stare
at that strange nibbling larva—
curious. It doesn’t occur to me
to tell her about what will happen.
I flit by as she stays on the wall.
She’ll learn soon enough. I breathe
into my wings. She’ll learn.
Aging
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, transformation, wine on July 2, 2021| 4 Comments »
The wine in the glass
remembers the long days in darkness
how it couldn’t breathe,
how it lost its scent of grape
and became more grapefruit,
more green pepper, more grass.
How it lost its harsh taste,
lost its astringence, and became
rounder, more smooth, more
wine. I, too, am changing
in these long days.
I, too, am converting what I’ve known
into what I will be.
I, too, am becoming something
I almost don’t recognize—
heady with transformation,
yet tethered by memory
of what it was like
to feel trapped,
what it was like
to steep in that darkness,
to have to learn to trust
whatever came next.
The Woman Who Wears Only Solids Remembers
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, clothes, life, youth on February 12, 2021| 2 Comments »
That was the year I only bought clothes imported from Bali—
baggy pants in a geometric black-and-white print,
long swishy flowery skirts in bright blues
and thin dresses with intricate knot designs.
I don’t know what became of them all—
Good Will, I suppose. Not that I want them back,
but I miss the girl who felt like a treasure in them,
who wore them lightly, who danced and ran in them,
who twirled in the middle of a field
so the fabric would ripple out and would fall down
in the grass and not worry about the stains.
I miss the girl who shrugged out of those clothes
every time she was near an alpine lake,
slipping nakedly into the icy clear water.
I miss how she wore her life back then,
like something exotic, something beautiful,
something new she couldn’t wait to try on.
Self-Portrait in Marble
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, nothing, sculpture, self-portrait on January 28, 2021| 2 Comments »
With its tiny claw chisel
Thursday has chipped
and carved, made cross hatches
and striations in who I thought I was
on Wednesday. Every day
there is less of me, and
every day I am fashioned
more into who I am, this
diminishing work in progress
in which the sculptor never
stops—once I thought
it would take forever to make
me, now there’s so little
left of the block I understand
that only what is not here
will be forever.
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer970-729-1838 wordwoman.com
Watch my TEDx talk The Art of Changing Metaphors: TEDX Rosemerry Trommer
By the Numbers
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, counting, numbers on September 9, 2020| 6 Comments »
Then let me measure my life
not in days, not in years,
but in how many sunflowers
grew in my gardens
and how many times
I stopped to notice
how beautiful they were.
Let me measure my life
in lines of poems
that slipped me
more deeply into the world
and in cups of earl gray tea.
Let me grow old
on belly laughs.
Let me know my true age
in kisses. And though
it is a finite number,
let me lose count.
In hug years,
let me be ancient.
In fist years,
let me always be young.
And let me measure my life
in songs that insisted I sing them.
May it equal the number of times
they were sung.
From the Cottonwood
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, cottonwood, learning, tree on August 16, 2020| 4 Comments »
I want to hear the song in the old cottonwood tree
outside my window, the tired xylem, the weary phloem,
the rough hymn of the ancient bark. I want to know
how, despite fatigue, it continues to flourish,
to push new cells through the tips of the twigs,
how it thickens despite long drought.
I want to hear the dark lullaby of the worms
as they move through the loyal roots—
what do they know of persistence?
And the dappld shadow that continues to grow,
what might it teach me of love?
Let me be the student of the limbs
that broke off in the wind. Let me listen
and listen again. There is too much
I think I know. I’ve been singing the same
familiar songs so long I began to believe
they were gospel. Oh, how I’ve loved the psalms of green.
Let me sing them while they last. And then, may I learn
to love the song of emptiness, song of surrender,
song of whatever comes next.
One Near a Mud Puddle
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, heart, love, poem, poetry on September 14, 2019| 2 Comments »
Autumn Beside the River
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, autumn, poem, poetry, river, trees on September 6, 2019| 2 Comments »
The rocks that were underwater
two months ago are dry now,
and a woman can sit on them
beneath the bridge and escape
the September sun. But she can’t
escape herself. There was a time
she really believed she could control things.
Now she sits with her own brokenness
and invites the inevitable autumn into her,
the autumn that’s already come.
Invites the lengthening nights. Invites
the dank scent of the garden, moldering and dead.
Invites the loss of green. You can’t be
a sapling forever, she tells herself,
though another part of her argues,
Yes you can, yes you can.
The river has never been so clear—
every rock in the bed is visible now,
and perhaps clarity is one of autumn’s best gifts.
She imagines the leaves of her falling off—
how she loves them.
She imagines them golden in the wind.
Two Chairs
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, poem, poetry, self talk, younger self, youth on August 20, 2019| 2 Comments »
I pull out two chairs. One for me.
One for the girl who didn’t want
to become a woman. The girl
who, at night, would use tweezers
to pull out any hairs that tried to grow
where her skin had always been smooth.
The girl who tied a bandana around
the small lumps of her breasts
to keep them from growing.
The girl who wanted to believe
she could stay a girl. I know
she would rather be outside
by the lake, fishing. Or exploring
the woods, looking for treasures.
Or making potions out of bark and grass
and berries in her mom’s old silver pot.
But she sits here with me, awkward,
slouching a little to pretend she isn’t so tall.
She tells me she wants to be a poet. How she
loves to play with words. How she knows
the other kids tease her behind her back.
How she sometimes thinks she might disappear
into light when the sun streaks through the clouds.
I just listen and nod. I know exactly how she feels.
I know she won’t believe me if I tell her
she’ll lose the battle with the hair.
That the bandana trick worked, perhaps too well.
That the joy she finds in writing will never leave her.
That she’ll forget the names of the kids
who teased her, but she’ll always remember
what they said. And despite all these tethers,
she’ll learn to disappear into the light,
to give herself completely to the world.
It will be so beautiful.
But for now, this reluctance,
this longing to remain a girl,
this certainty that there is magic
here in childhood that she never wants to lose.