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Posts Tagged ‘connection’

After the Loss

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. 

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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.

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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.

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kneeling in front of the wild rose
nose buried in pink petals,
the whole world fitsinto one wild rose

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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. 

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1990


 
 
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.

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On Waking


 
 
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?

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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.

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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.

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Two Mothers


 
 
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

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because
you,
me

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The Bear

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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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The Great Chorus


 
 
We all live together in a home
in which the rooms are
made of song. Fierce
songs of resistance. Wounded
songs that rise like sirens and
drown out every other song, till
once again, we hear the tendrilled
song of opening. Chants
of freedom. Wild song
of belonging. Sweet lullaby
of trust. What moment cannot
be met through song? Even
the greatest heartache, even
the greatest joy, even
the smallest hope knows
itself not only by its melody, but
by who is willing to sing along and
who is courageous enough to listen.

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Though a cold
wind is howling,
we’re not birds
without wings—
and as long as we
have voices
let us sing together,
sing of freedom,
sing what’s true,
let us sing.

  • “birds without wings” is from John Lewis’s speech, January 9, 2005, at the Kennedy Center, at a choral tribute honoring Dr. Martin Luther King

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Carpe Diem


 
Every day you have less reason not to give yourself away.
                  —Wendell Berry, 1993, I
 
 
Knowing today brings the day of my death
one day closer, I decide to love you more.
By which I mean, I decide
to practice letting myself be
exactly who I am and letting you be
exactly who you are and noticing how
love grows in that most rich soil—
not the thick clay of longing for things
to be different, but the good loam
of reality. Our time here is too dear
to be spent with fruitless wishing.
In this generous earth of allowing,
what might grow? Real love.
The kind that requires nothing
but our laughter and tears,
our anger and forgiveness, our frustration
and tenderness. I feel love root anew
in this ground where soon enough
I, too, will belong. Do you feel it, too,
the blooming between us, this love
that asks only for us
to be faithfully ourselves?

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How We Are Held


 
 
When my arms were the most empty,
when my hands were unable to hold anything
and I was most unselved,
that was when I felt the most gathered up
by love. An immeasurable and wildly precise love.
Even when I wanted to push love away.
Even when I felt too broken to be found.
I felt love gather all my pieces.
Not to fix them.
Not to put them back together.
Love simply held every shattered thought
and every ruined dream and cradled me
just as I was. Not because I deserved it.
Just because that is what love does.
I am learning to trust this feeling of belonging
to the world, broken as it is, broken as I am,
learning to trust I need not do a thing to belong.
I do not know how it all works
or why I was able to receive it.
But I can’t unknow this unfathomable truth:
how love holds us when we cannot
hold anything, gentle as silence,
fierce as a flood, true as the breaking itself.
The way the ocean forever holds every wave.
The way the shore forever changes to hold the ocean.

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Redefinition


 
 
when I say my heart breaks
I mean it breaks like a wave—
as if exhausted
by its own separateness
it gives itself back to the whole

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