The way moss softens
the edges of what is hard.
The way it thrives in shadow.
Oh heart. The work
of loving the world
can look so much
like moss doing
what moss does—
growing in places
that seem uninhabitable.
It doesn’t even need roots
to survive.
Posts Tagged ‘love’
Adapting
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged adapting, love, loving the world, moss on September 12, 2025| Leave a Comment »
Gesture
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged gesture, involuntary movement, long marriage, love on September 2, 2025| 4 Comments »
I love when he puts his fingers
to his lips and holds them there,
as if creating a tiny place to hide.
It’s like a cloud attempting
to hide the whole sky.
When we first met,
I began to do it, too,
hold my fingers to my lips
as if in this way I might become
a little more him. It felt like
trying on someone else’s shoes.
And then there were the years
I wanted nothing between us,
and I felt a small slice of anger
each time he’d cover his face.
This is the way of old love.
What first attracts us then repels,
then one day attracts us again
as we learn to love the other
without trying to change them.
There he is now, on the couch,
three fingers pressed to his lips.
I love the man I see and
the man he tries to hide.
At some point, my longing
to change him became the cloud.
All along, he was the sky.
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.
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.
Some of the Stories
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged garden, love, self-compassion, self-loathing, self-love on August 4, 2025| 11 Comments »
It all serves.
—Joi Sharp
Strange, perhaps, this path
to learn to love myself—
throwing back Mad Dog 20/20
in a raucous backyard party.
Letting college boys touch me
just to feel wanted for a night.
The journals I kept to calculate
how many calories in a bowl of All Bran
a banana muffin, a cucumber, a plum.
I don’t know why I had to date
that man who took what I
did not want to give. Why
I became quiet, quieter still.
I don’t know why I told that lie.
Don’t know why I couldn’t contain
my anger that one morning. Don’t know
why I said yes when I meant no.
But I do know I am the sum
of all these stories, and maybe
I had to go through self-loathing
before I could practice self-love.
I know all those choices brought me here
to this garden in late summer
where, despite a lack of rain,
the nasturtiums are thriving
like tiny orange teachers in how to be soft.
There is a love so much greater than I am
that guides me to wrap the arms of my heart
around all the younger versions of myself
as if they are my children, helping me trust
there is nothing they could do
that would make them unlovable,
even when their actions caused pain.
Look, I say to my past, to myself. The roses
I thought were dead are blooming.
Things grow in the most surprising ways.
Soon, there will be sunflowers.
Conversation that Didn’t Happen Out Loud While Hiking
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged hiking, love, marriage, unspoken on July 19, 2025| Leave a Comment »
It was instantly lush,
the way nothing else
was on that hillside,
but as we stepped
into the aspen grove,
what was crisp and
sun-dried in the sun
became gloriously green.
And the scent of it!
The fecund, feral scent
of it! And I understood,
in that moment, how
both can be true
at the very same time—
how the same hillside
can be both dying
of drought and sheltered
by shade. Same as our lives
have been. And though
I did not turn to you
in that moment and say
I love you, I’d like to think
you knew it anyway,
like to think the truth
of how I love you
clings to you the way
dew drops cling
to the leaves of the lupine.
I’d like to think that even
though I didn’t turn around,
you knew what I was thinking,
and you were saying back to me,
yes, I love you, too.
The Mother Wonders about Love
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged birthday, daughter, love, refuge on July 15, 2025| 4 Comments »
for Vivian on her 17th birthday
I don’t understand how it is that loving you
asks both everything and nothing from me.
Every day since your birth I have nourished
this love with time, with touch, with words,
and loved you the way I was loved—knowing
there is nothing you could do or be that
could make me stop loving you. I thought
I was making a refuge for you, but
every day since your birth, the love
you’ve given back to me has become
my sanctuary, a place I show up exactly as I am,
with bad breath, with tired arms, with a faulty
memory and dirt in my fingernails and trust
you will love me, too. Every day we build together
the nest of love. Once we wove in fairy houses
and reading books and making up secret handshakes.
Now we weave in cinema and long road trips and
floating on the pond. And trust is the glue
that holds the nest together, even as
it changes every day. It surprises me
the nest of love is less a place and more
a spaciousness inside—not somewhere we go,
more something we are, so even when
we’re not together, the refuge is always within us,
a love that asks nothing and everything,
a home that grows as we both continue to grow.
The Night I Fell in Love with the Whole World
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged airport, connection, love, trust on June 23, 2025| 12 Comments »
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. Every one a grandchild.
Every one a light. It was like, how on these midsummer
nights, the late sun shines long though the cities and fields
and everything, everything is beautiful.
Oh, people of Iran. Israel. Palestine. Ukraine.
Russia. Somalia. Yemen. Maine. I will never know you,
yet I honor how you carry inside you your own strange
and beautiful spark. How each of you, too, is a grandchild.
Each of you, too, longs to belong. No matter what our leaders do,
the light is right to see how much, you, too, long to be safe,
to be seen, to be kind, to be loved, to be trusted, to be home.