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Posts Tagged ‘daughter’

When My Teenage Daughter Stays Home Sick

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on November 1, 2024| 5 Comments »


 
 
We color. I pull out the only coloring book
we have left, most of the pages already full
of half-finished attempts from years ago.
Blue and pink seals. A resting jaguar
with one purple eye, the other eye green.
We sit side by side the way we have
since she could first hold a crayon
and choose a fresh page to color.
She coughs. I sing with her playlist.
We chatter about nothing important
and fill in the green of the leaves,
make a monkey with orange and blue hair.
And it’s boring. We both agree.
Buy my god, I’m so grateful today
to be bored with her,
so grateful to fill in the lines
because right now, there is no room
but this one, this the gift:
her sniffling, the house filled with midday sun,
my life so tethered to her life,
the pink pencil growing shorter every minute.

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One Hearing My Daughter Laugh

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on October 24, 2024| 4 Comments »


just when I think
I’m made of sludge
you candle me

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One Growing Awareness

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on September 1, 2024| 4 Comments »

millions of small miracles
bring me to this morning
beside you

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One While Watching the Film

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on August 31, 2024| 3 Comments »

my daughter’s tears
find their way
into my eyes

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Bowing at the Feet of the Ordinary

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on August 25, 2024| 9 Comments »

Bowing at the Feet of the Ordinary


May I remember this day
with its two-hundred twenty two
miles of pavement and my
daughter beside me and both
of us singing her favorite songs.
Remember this day not because
it was special but because
it was the way it always is,
with us laughing and talking
and sitting in easy silence.
With a stop at the car wash
and her grumbling about vacuuming,
then doing it anyway. With
a stop at the coffee shop
and me grumbling about
cake pops, then buying one
anyway. With the sweetness
of ripe Cresthaven peaches
we bought at the roadside stand—
how the juice dripped down our chins.
With the rich green of late summer
a blur out the window. The day
so infused with commonplace
love I never once doubted
I belonged with my girl, in that car,
in the world, in the universe,
the days getting shorter
but still so luminous, so warm.

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What a Friendship Can Do

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on August 18, 2024| 7 Comments »


 
for V, L, C and M
 
 
They know they are beautiful.
The way late-summer snapdragons
know they are beautiful, whether
they’re budded or blossoming
or making new seed. The way
the sky knows it’s beautiful whether
it’s wearing the pink silks of dawn,
the deep blue shift of midday or
the soft black drapes of night.
They walk down the street and
a wake of laughter follows them.
Even their shadows, joined
by the hip, are beautiful.
Everywhere they go, the world
seems to open. They are not beautiful
the way cruelty is sometimes beautiful—
shiny, powerful, seductive.
They are beautiful the way only
love is beautiful—as if there is
a golden thread that connects them
to each other, to everything they touch.

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Putting My Daughter on the Plane to Guatemala

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on August 12, 2024| 9 Comments »


 
 
I would like to say I wasn’t afraid,
but I was. I know too well how a plane
can fall from the sky. How terrible
 
things happen to innocent people.
How even when we try our hardest
to keep others safe, they can die.
 
Driving toward home, I was a snail
without its shell, a seed without its husk,
a woman alone in the dark with her fear.
 
I remember thinking if I needed to,
I could live through any future disaster,
even my worst nightmare.
 
But what I really needed was
to live in that very moment.
The more I was right where I was,
 
the more I felt the mystery around
and inside me, swirling until I was bigger
somehow, no less afraid but more spacious,
 
And though the world did not comfort me,
I felt myself soften as I flowed toward
the inevitable—flowed the way a river flows,
 
moved the way the wind moves,
grew the way a woman grows
when she meets the world that is here.

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

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Reunion

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on August 10, 2024| Leave a Comment »


 
To drive through the starless night.
To arrive at the airport in time to greet
the traveler at the gate.
To embrace her in your arms
and nuzzle your nose in her hair.
To be nowhere in that moment
but there. To stare into her face
until the heart is satisfied
and the lungs remember
how to breathe. To see
in her eyes a constellation
that helps you navigate home. To know
reunion’s sweeter for the letting go.

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Falling Asleep to the Sound of My Daughter Giggling

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on July 31, 2024| 6 Comments »


 
 
Whatever in me feels sodden,
soiled, weighty, it slips from
my body, as if her laughter
is rain until all that is left in me
is sky.

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The Day Before Your Sixteenth Birthday

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on July 14, 2024| 7 Comments »

We float side by side on the pond for an hour—
you in a tube, me on a paddleboard,
both of us deep in our books.
But even immersed in another world,
I slip more deeply in love with this one
in which I’m your mother and you
my girl and our stories are woven
so closely together that even before
I flip the page of tomorrow, I know
for certain I will love you even more.

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