for my baby brother
peaceful as any mountain meadow,
this chance to walk a city block
with sirens and screeching trains
and flashing lights and car alarms
and my arm tucked tightly into yours
Posts Tagged ‘connection’
One Other Version of Heaven
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged brother, city, connection, country mouse, sister on September 27, 2025| 8 Comments »
What No One Else Can See
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, daughter, love, mother, string on September 20, 2025| Leave a Comment »
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.
Bridge Impressions
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bridge, connection, friendship on August 24, 2025| 2 Comments »
Imagine if, instead of a wall,
we built a bridge between us,
a bridge made of every door
we ever locked, every carpet
we did not lay down for each other,
every fear that’s kept us
from saying hello.
I want to take the risk
to walk toward you
as through a sparkling sky
entranced by the scent
of greening all around—
want to pause with you
mid-bridge and notice how
it can be so beautiful,
this place between us.
Fräulein
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, daughter, music, singing, song on August 20, 2025| 4 Comments »
Just because it’s a song about a man leaving a woman
and realizing he still loves her doesn’t mean
it isn’t also a song about a mother and a daughter
singing their hearts out in a car, both of us
falling in love with what the human voice can do
and what a song can do when two people choose
to sing it together, over and over, until it becomes
our anthem, until it becomes the glue in something
larger than we are, something less about the words
and more about the transmission of love,
the shared moments in which we come together
to sing it, you on the melody with Tyler Childers,
me on the harmony with Colter Wall. And the more
we sing it, the more I’m in love not just with the song,
but with you, because no matter what the song is about,
it’s our song, and we choose to sing it again and again,
because joy, because the way two voices come together
as one, even out of tune, because, Fräulein, this song is ours.
Call and Response
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, friendship, moon, nature on August 11, 2025| 2 Comments »
for Cindy
Are you there? she said
as she came to my door.
I’m here, I said.
Are you there? she said.
I’m here, I said.
Come, she said,
and we walked to the field
where behind the ridge
the glow of the moon
had begun to appear.
We whispered as we waited
for the moon to rise,
whispered of dreams
and legacies, until, at last,
the fullness had rounded
into the sky,
and we said goodnight,
both of us knowing
we’d witnessed a miracle—
not the miracle of moonrise,
though that, too,
but the alchemy of two hearts
choosing to meet
the world together.
After the Loss
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, grief, love on August 6, 2025| 16 Comments »
It arrived as a tidal wave,
so much love from
so many people
all around the world.
Too much, too much,
I thought, until
I imagined just one
person not sending
love and then knew
with every cell
that drowning in love
was the only way
to stay afloat.—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
*a personal note–
dear friends, we are a week from the fourth anniversary of my son’s death, and as I reach this milestone I can feel it approaching in my body–something in the color of the trees, the temperature at night, the slant of the light. My whole body remembers. And I remember, too, not only the horror but also the shock of the love. And so many of you were the ones who were there for me. I will forever remember how carried I was (still am) by your love. Thank you for the tidal wave. I do not know how I would have survived without it. May all who are grieving be carried by love through no effort of their own.
*Also, I will be away from internet for the next few days. I will wait to release this week’s single from my new album Risking Love until I return, and friends, it is HAWT. I’ll be back with a bouquet of poems for you, plus the new video, on Sunday night.
The Chosen
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged choosing, chosen, connection, fruit, grocery store, melon, prayer on August 2, 2025| 3 Comments »
You hear how this one is dull, she said,
as she knocked on the melon.
I rapped the green skin and nodded.
Now, she said, try this one.
I knocked and heard the brightness.
Vibrant, she said. Vibrant, I agreed.
She picked it up and handed the melon
to me. This one, she said. Choose this one.
Tonight, I imagine some great hand
coming to knock on my chest, rapping
just above my heart, testing me
to see if I am one worth choosing.
I’m surprised by the prayer that arrives.
Choose us all, please, choose us all.
Sitting in a Circle of Friends
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, friendship, laughter, Lisa Issenberg, paradox, togetherness on July 20, 2025| 2 Comments »
We are laughing, and the sound
is sweet as honeysuckle—
the way it clings to the air—
and even as I laugh,
I’m aware of the many wounds
each of these women
have endured, imagining
how often we have wept,
sometimes with each other,
sometimes alone. Knowing
the ache somehow makes
the laughter all the more sweet—
and the joy of it stitches into me
like a golden thread.
I welcome the pierce
as I feel it connect us,
knowing if I tug on this strand
twenty years from now,
it will bring me back to this night
with its warm summer air
and low summer light,
this radiant night sparkling
with a laughter we nourished
for years by loving each other
through all those tears.
One When I Least Expect It
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, pause, perspective, Wild Rose on July 9, 2025| 1 Comment »
kneeling in front of the wild rose
nose buried in pink petals,
the whole world fitsinto one wild rose
The Night I Fell in Love with the Whole World
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged airport, connection, love, trust on June 23, 2025| 12 Comments »
The Night I Fell in Love with the Whole World
It was the boy at baggage claim who started it.
His elation! Each time a new bag would drop,
he would point at the suitcase and squeal,
then turn to his grandmother with incandescent delight.
His grandmother deepened my joy. How she beamed
at her grandson, praised him in Spanish, her words
a bright blur I interpreted more through hunch
than through certainty. And sooner than you’d think,
I fell in love with every single person at baggage claim sixteen.
Didn’t need to know their stories to know
they were worthy of love. Everyone a grandchild.
Everyone a light. It was like, how on these midsummer
nights, the late sun shines long though the cities and fields
and everything, every whole and broken thing, is beautiful.
Oh, people of Iran. Israel. Palestine. Ukraine.
Russia. Somalia. Yemen. America. I will never know you,
yet I honor how you carry inside you your own strange
and beautiful spark. Each of us longs to belong.
No matter what our leaders do, the light is right
to see how much we all long to be safe, to be seen,
to be kind, to be trusted, to meet on any street,
in any room, all of us slivers of divinity.
1990
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, humility, memory, summer on June 10, 2025| 4 Comments »
That was the summer I picked up a sex worker
on East Colfax, confusing her upturned thumb
for hitchhiking. Imagine her surprise
when she got into my mom’s silver Volvo and saw me,
a girl of twenty in a pink dress I wore
for my theater internship that day.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“Oh, you know,” she said, “just down the road.”
This is how I remember it. I warned her
how dangerous that part of town could be
before she told me how her pimp would beat her.
I think we both shocked each other.
She couldn’t imagine why I had picked her up.
To this day, I am grateful she never let me go.
On Waking
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, dream, liminal space, waking on June 4, 2025| 2 Comments »
Do you, too, love the time between dream and day
when we are gauzy and diaphanous,
more sky than clay, more the spiral than DNA,
love those moments before you remember
your name, before you remember the guns
and the bombs and the lines we have drawn
around right and wrong, before you remember the fingers
we point and those pointed at us and the blame
we shove back and forth. Even now, midday,
if, still, we close our eyes and breathe,
we can almost return to the innocence of it,
can almost feel the weightlessness, the wildness,
the generous knowing of being without measure,
without border, without label, without should.
Imagine we could meet in that undefined space,
that liminal, boundaryless place. All of us nameless
at the very same time. It wouldn’t last. The alarm
always rings. But what if when we all emerge,
some of that spaciousness would cling to us
as we make coffee. Open the door. Drive the car.
Say hello. What would we make of the news?
Opposite Sides
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, opposition, relationship, swimming on May 13, 2025| Leave a Comment »
If you were in Europe and I were in Boston,
it would take eighty days to swim to you.
Sometimes it feels as if you are in England
and I’m standing on the Atlantic’s opposite shore.
Sometimes it’s all I can do to dip my toes in the water.
Sometimes I swim out till I start to fear
what swims with me. Always I turn back.
This time, I want to swim. Want to swim eighty days
if that’s what it takes, regardless how big the waves.
Want to swim eighty days no matter how cold.
Though the waves are big as our country.
Though I am exhausted and afraid of what I might find
on the shores of you. What I long to find: you,
swimming toward me. Want to meet you
at forty days, both of us ungrounded,
both of us vulnerable, both of us ready
to swim toward safety together.
Intergalactic Love
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, galaxy, heart, love on May 6, 2025| 4 Comments »
If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you, and if you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.
—The Gospel of Thomas, verse 70
There is a galaxy in my heart,
a vastness that surprises me
each time I dare look—
my god, it’s so much larger
than I could ever explore.
Filled with dark things that defy
investigation and dead places
where nothing can live and brilliant
places so radiant I’m unable to look
straight on. There is a galaxy
in my heart so expansive it sometimes
frightens me—what does it mean
to not know my own bounds?
What if I never live into my capacity to love?
There is a galaxy in my heart
that knows itself by spiraling,
swirling out from its own center,
and forming new stars.
Did I ever believe it was limited
to hold only so much?
The galaxy in my heart
invites me to remember
I am made of mystery, and
whatever theories I have
of how and who I love
are always being changed.
Even now, it stuns me,
how galaxies sometimes merge.
Imagine, if your galaxy
and my galaxy come together,
my god, how much vaster
our hearts can become.
Two Mothers
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged candle, connection, loss, mothers on May 4, 2025| 2 Comments »
lighting a small candle tonight
for your child as you
light a small candle for mine—
from hundreds of miles and years apart
we rhyme
One Interconnectedness
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cause and effect, connection, friendship, interconnectedness, legacy on May 1, 2025| 6 Comments »
because
you,
me
The Bear
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, friendship, gift on April 30, 2025| 2 Comments »
for Linda Keetch
In a room where I have never been,
I walk in to find a small brown teddy bear
sits on a couch. Envelope in his lap.
On the envelope, my name.
There are thousands, maybe millions
of ways people show up to say
I am here to help you carry
the weight of your life.
This is how a light tan bear
who sits at eight inches tall
is big enough to embody
a forest-sized compassion.
This is how the soft plush of his belly
becomes a wide portal
through which love can reach
to meet us exactly as we are,
which changes nothing
and everything.
How I’ve Started to Pray
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, god, prayer on April 3, 2025| 4 Comments »
And if god is in everything—in the bend of the river
and the apricot tree, the song of the blackbird
and the awkward smile of the little ballerina
in purple who wandered out tonight onto the stage
to join a dance recital already in progress—
a dance class that wasn’t even hers— yes, if god
is in everything, and I believe god is—
in the dishrag, in the man who throws
bottles at the people marching for peace,
even in this angriest red sliver of me,
if god is in everything then maybe that is why
I have started to want to pray to everything—
or maybe more truly, to pray with everything—
the wave, the blossom, the awkward smile,
the dirty cotton, the broken glass, the rising ache,
the wonder that opens in me when I trust
there was never even a half of a moment when we all
did not deeply, fully, wholly belong to each other.
Meeting Intimidation
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged compassion, connection, friendship, intimidation on March 13, 2025| 4 Comments »
What if, in that moment when Wendy introduced us,
I had not been afraid to say more than hello?
What if I had not turned toward someone else
as if I had something I needed to say to them.
A week later, it’s so easy to see what I was doing
was turning away from the woman who,
through no fault of her own, daunted me.
What if I’d decided it was okay to feel afraid
and I invited myself to be uncomfortable
and stay with the interaction anyway?
What if I had asked her a question, any
open and honest question, such as,
“What felt good to you about tonight?”
Or, “How does it feel to be here?”
What if I had said nothing at all, and simply
offered her my awkward but honest attention?
How often do I let my fear make choices for me?
How much is lost in these moments of cowardice?
A chance for connection? A chance to meet
the small and uneasy parts of me that I would rather
hide from? A chance to see through my defenses?
A chance to be surprised by how generous
the world can be when I don’t turn away?
Letter to My Heart
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged compassion, connection, empathy, heart, imitation, mockingbird, song on March 8, 2025| 6 Comments »
Once I was embarrassed
you were a mockingbird.
I wished you were more
hermit thrush, more meadowlark,
more cliff swallow in the canyon,
heck, even wished you were
robin or wren.
At last I’m coming to see
the gift of learning another’s song,
letting it pierce you, own you,
then braiding it with your own tune,
to sing back to the world
as one.