I don’t know why sometimes
the same story can feel like ash
in the mouth and another time
like flame. Each time the story
is the same, but sometimes,
it scorches to share it.
I am thinking of today, how I read
a poem about your death
as if there were no more fuel to burn,
reciting a fact, as if saying,
There is no snow in the yard.
Five minutes later, I read the same
poem and had to restart four times
just to get past the first two lines.
I prefer the flame. Prefer to be moved
by how much you’ve changed me.
Not to dwell in the loss, but not
to shy from being torched by love.
Posts Tagged ‘grief’
How It Comes Out
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged feeling, flame, friendship, grief, love, sorrow on January 4, 2026| 10 Comments »
After Reaching for You
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dream, grief, memory, stillness on December 20, 2025| 6 Comments »
for Finn
There was a list. We were laughing.
This is all I remember as first light
enters the windows, slips
somehow through closed lids.
I keep my eyes closed in hopes
that if I am still enough I can grasp
an image tendril of the dream
and tug it closer.
For hours, it doesn’t work.
When I stop reaching, what is here
are real memories of you—your
head bent over the table doing math,
how jealous you were of your sister’s
snowman stuffy, the way your feet hung
over the end of almost every bed.
Is it true all I had to do was stop reaching
for the dream so that whole skeins
of memories could unravel and wrap
me in their long, faithful strands?
Is it true being still is now the best
way I can hold you? I am still.
Somehow in the softening, I don’t feel
your hand here in my open hand, but I do.
The Talisman
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dad, daughter, grief, love, protection on December 2, 2025| 7 Comments »
It wasn’t the time he taught me to ride
without training wheels. Wasn’t fishing
on the lake for crappies or hunting
in the Wisconsin woods for squirrels.
Wasn’t the cassette tapes he made me
when I moved away from home or the rare tears
he cried when I left. It wasn’t the way
he forgave me when I forgot to call
on his fiftieth birthday. Wasn’t the white
sweater he bought me the year before he died
because he said I looked so beautiful in it.
Or maybe it was all those things—everything
he did, everything he was, every quiet touch and
unsung sacrifice ,so I never once doubted his love.
His love as solid as he was. His love stained me.
Can never be removed, no matter how fiercely
the world tries to scrub me of hope.
Every day I take in the violent raids,
the infinite ways we defile and dismiss
and destroy each other. And still I can’t unknow
his love, can’t untrust we are capable
of such goodness, such unflinching generosity.
His love, the talisman I wear in every cell.
It protects me not from the horror, but
from the error of believing the horror is all.
There is also how he hummed to me
when I was scared. How he cheered for me,
even when I failed. How in my most vulnerable
hours, he held me and whispered my name.
Sometimes Grief Looks Like This
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged belonging, forest, grief on November 19, 2025| 4 Comments »
The woman walks into the woods.
How beautiful, she thinks, though
on closer look, all around her
the woods sprawl in wild disarray.
Fallen logs decompose, wood rots,
decays. Bark peels. Brambles scramble.
Berries darken and shrivel. Moss drops off
in great chunks. Broken sticks hang
from broken branches. And all of it belongs.
She thinks how messy grief can be.
The barbed thorns of anger, vast thickets
of I don’t know. Most times there is
no trail at all. Why did she think
human nature would be any different from
nature itself? Oh this messy humaning.
She tells herself, All belongs. All belongs.
The more she believes it, the more she feels
the forest inside her, witnesses how the more
it stretches, the more it rots, the more it grows.
Going Fishing with Dad Four Years After His Death
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ars poetica, dad, fishing, grief on November 19, 2025| 5 Comments »
Dear Dad,
Yesterday I met a man who went fishing.
It was sleety, bracing, gray.
He went fishing anyway. Actually,
as you would say, he went “catching.”
Just one fish, he said, but I felt his gladness,
the modest kind that does not
depend on good weather, the gladness
we feel when we follow the pull
of what we love. Like how I find pleasure
in writing, even when the conditions
are heartache and loss. Even then,
there’s pleasure in standing in the river
of the moment, my whole body attuned,
waiting for the tug. It made me feel close to you dad,
the way his face lit up, just as yours used to
when the talk turned to what was biting.
And now writing to you about my day,
it’s like I’ve cast a line to you. The rain
in here tastes like salt, but oh the gladness
when I feel it on your end, the tug.
Just Before the Grief Retreat
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged baseball, community, funky town, grief, silly, theme song on November 16, 2025| 6 Comments »
What if it’s like baseball,
Paula says, and you enter
the room the way the players
enter the field, with a theme song?
I look around the spacious room,
chairs and cushions set in a large circle,
flowers, candles and tissues in the center.
What if, when everyone is already
sitting in the circle, you kick open
the door and make an entrance
to this? And she pulls up a tune
on her phone. It begins slow—
strings and cello.
“Funky Town?”
She laughs as I strut
to the center of the room,
knees bent and flapping,
arms pumping in the air
to legato orchestral disco.
I welcome the invisible crowds.
No ball, no bat, no ump, no score.
But there is this field where we gather
to meet what life throws at us.
There are these innings of loss,
these home runs of love, curve balls of ache.
There is this sacred diamond with facets
that light up when we talk about it,
talk about it, talk about it, talk about it,
these gifts when we realize
we are not at all behind in the count.
Oh my broken open heart, I think,
you don’t gotta move on.
You are right where you need to be.
Eyesight
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bees, flowers, garden, grief, mother, sight, vision on October 21, 2025| 9 Comments »
I’ve never seen the world the bee sees,
a world of iridescence in which petals
change color depending on the angle,
a world in which a field of sunflowers appear
not as a smear of yellow but as individual
blooms. I’ve never seen the bullseye
pattern in the primrose or the pansy,
these human eyes unable to perceive
designs in UV light. Today I look out
at the empty garden where just last week
there were marigolds and calendula,
and I see the absence of flowers, but also,
I see mounds of golds, yellows, oranges, and
I see the boy who used to sit on the edge
of the wooden beds and I see the young
version of me, not yet gray, weeding
the rows, while the boy tells me stories
about school and the things he longs
for beyond what he has. They’re there,
I know, the flowers, the woman,
the boy, though somehow they’re so far
beyond the spectrum not even
the bees can see them.
The Holding
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grief, heart, holding, pain, pond on September 15, 2025| Leave a Comment »
The way the shore holds the pond,
that is how I want to hold
the pain in my heart, honoring
how vital it is. How it is home
to things with hard shells and sharp
claws and also to beings with gossamer
wings. To drain it would be to lose
my aliveness. To become barren,
cracked, dry. I can’t say I love
the spider-like skaters that streak
across the top, nor the thick gray muck
that lines the bottom. But I love
the green rushes that rim the edges,
the red-stemmed willows, the wild
iris. It is no easy thing to hold pain,
but I look how vibrant the pond shore is.
This alive is how I want to live.
As It All Comes Down
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged autumn, grief, hiking, inner landscape, intimacy, marriage on September 13, 2025| Leave a Comment »
On the day his brother died,
we walked, mostly silent.
The old aspen trees were tall
and dead. In a meadow, we found
a single yellow flower where almost
all else was brown. The air carried
the wild scent of elk, dank, sweet.
And the wind made of dry grass
an epiphany of sound.
But it was the quiet landscape
inside us that was most changed.
In a voice so bare I could hardly hear,
he said, These are the days
that bring us closer together.
On the Eve of His 21st Birthday
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged birthday, gratefulness, grief, photo, sadness, tears on September 11, 2025| 18 Comments »
There is a joy that chases sadness
and sometimes overtakes it, as if
the two are racing down a hill,
their shadows sometimes merging—
and this is how a woman looking at a photo
of her son when he was still alive,
his face radiant with elation,
might find herself not knowing
if her tears are made of gratefulness
or sorrow, two parallel emotions
that sometimes twine inside us.
Nor does it matter to her.
Gratefulness. Sorrow. It seems right
she should weep either way.
Both feelings are fashioned from love.
She is here for all of it.
The salt tastes just the same.
Those of Us Who Choose to Turn Toward Grief
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged community, grief, guinea pig on September 3, 2025| 6 Comments »
Somehow we find each other,
though our gathering
doesn’t fix or change the loss,
there is tenderness, even beauty,
in coming together. I have read
in Switzerland it’s illegal to own
just one guinea pig.
It’s considered animal abuse
because they are social beings.
We, too, are social beings.
Perhaps we don’t sniff and nudge
and squeak and rumble strut,
but we cradle, we hum, we hold.
We whisper soft encouragement.
Light candles. Offer tissues. Hug.
There are times when I deeply need
to be alone with my grief. Even then,
curled into myself, quiet in a quiet dark room,
even then I am held by the certainty
I am not alone. What a gift we give
to ourselves, to each other,
when, in our grief, we enter
the circle of those who grieve
and meet each other with open hands
and say I see you, brother, I see you,
sister. I know it isn’t easy. Here I am.
—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Sleep Walker
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dream, grief, waking, walking on August 27, 2025| 2 Comments »
Sometimes in my sleep
I walk with you. In the woods
or through the halls of a school
or once in a cave with turquoise pools.
We are almost always laughing.
Sometimes we play chase.
Only when I wake do I remember
you are gone. Is it any wonder
I like to linger in bed, sometimes
for hours, as if I could touch
the dream again, my eyes still closed,
my hands wide open.
Ongoing
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grief, joy, laughter, memory on August 20, 2025| 1 Comment »
I don’t know how, after your son has died,
you go on, she said, and I don’t know either,
but this morning, I walked through the field
where he used to drive the Gator, pulling his
friends behind him in an old red canoe, all
of them howling their laughter, shrieking their joy,
and I stood in that empty field and wept, my heart
in halves, and a scrap of old joy slipped through
the crack, and I laughed, tears streaming, I laughed.
So Alive
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged flowers, garden, grief, holy, loss on August 15, 2025| 22 Comments »
Finn, the larkspur are nearly done blooming now,
the tall stalks are scruffy with seed pods where
the dark blue petals used to be.
Is it strange to give you the garden report?
Today is four years since you chose to leave
this world of bindweed and deep red dahlia,
this world of millipedes and green beans
dangling on their vines. The sky is thick
with smoke from a wildfire not so far away.
It was a relief when it began to rain
while I was picking snapdragons and
sunflowers, zinnias and lavender.
I didn’t mind getting drenched
while I filled five vases with flowers,
four vases for our home and one
your father and I took to your grave.
I felt so alive in the middle of the storm,
arranging the blooms in vases just so
while the water dripped from my hair, my nose.
Felt so alive as I smelled the air and spoke
to you and the flowers and sky.
Today my friend Wini told me one way
to keep life sacred is to ask the holy to come.
Please, I said as I stood in the rows.
Please, come. Is it possible the asking itself
is the bridge from the everyday to the holy?
Because I felt it. There in the rain
with my grief-bent heart. There beside
the calendula, aphids and all. Hair plastered
to my head. Tears on my face. Memory
of you writing I love you in the carrot bed.
Me making bouquets for a difficult day.
Even when it hurts, the holy.
After a Morning of Crossing Things from a List
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged death anniversary, grief, love, missing, river, silence, talking to the dead on August 13, 2025| 12 Comments »
Then comes the moment
when not one thing is more important
than walking to the river
and finding a wide rock in the middle
of the flow where I can sit
and speak to you.
There’s not much to say
these days besides I love you,
I miss you. So I say the paltry words,
six inadequate syllables.
As always they are sorry translations
for the infinite songs of my heart.
So I sit on the rock and listen;
silence the language you speak now.
I’ve been learning its tender
conjugations—you were. You are.
You have been. You will have been.
Is it true they all sound the same?
I practice silence long enough
the river moves through me
touching all I cannot say.
I don’t know how I know
when it is time to rise.
The silence holds me.
I teach the silence your name.