For two weeks after he died,
I’d fall asleep exhausted
only to wake just past midnight.
Desperate, I’d claw at sleep,
frantic to catch it and clutch it,
but always it slipped my grasp
and I’d lie awake till morning.
My friend suggested
I reframe those sleepless hours
as a sacred time, an intimate,
personal quiet time. Not a problem.
Not something to be treated.
Not something to be feared.
That night, as I emerged from sleep,
dreams dripping from me like water,
I did not resist the waking.
Instead, eyes closed, heart open,
still lying in bed, I said,
I love you, Finn. I miss you, sweetheart.
And woke on the shore of morning.
Ever since, it happens just like this—
when I slip from sleep,
I tell my son I love him
and slide unknowingly
back into the tide of dreams.
How many hundreds of times
when he was young, did I go to him
when he cried out in the night?
I’d press my palms against his chest
until his breath was a skiff for dreams.
Years later, though I can’t feel his hands,
though I don’t hear the lullaby of his breath,
somehow he arrives to comfort me.
And though I don’t hear him say
the words I’d always say to him,
I feel them float above me like a blanket,
warm in the cool night air—
Shhh. I’m here. It’s okay. I’m here.
Posts Tagged ‘mother’
In Those Quiet Hours
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged mother, night, reframe, sleep, son on December 29, 2021| 26 Comments »
Baking a Cake for Timothée Chalamet’s Birthday
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cake, celebrate, daughter, kitchen, mother, Timothee Chalamet on December 28, 2021| 6 Comments »
It doesn’t come out well.
The blue icing is constellated
with dark chocolate crumbs.
And the icing itself, well,
the mixer broke last week,
so we stirred it by hand
and it’s lumpy.
But we did it, my daughter
and I, we made the cake
and frosted it and she even wrote
in lopsided white frosting cursive
Happy Birthday Timothée Hal C.
And neither of us cares
that the cake isn’t beautiful.
I don’t even like cake.
But I like baking in the kitchen
with my daughter, and I am eager
to celebrate just about anything right now—
morning, a bird at the feeder,
a clean window, feet, carrots, heck,
even the wonder of dish soap, and sure,
the birthday of the goofy
and beautiful Timothée Chalamet—
let’s have a party. Let’s bake a cake.
Let’s sing a song we all know
and light some candles.
Let’s make lavish wishes.
And if there isn’t sweetness
to be found, let’s make it.
If you appreciate receiving these free daily poems, please consider making a donation.
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer970-729-1838 wordwoman.com
Watch my TEDx talk The Art of Changing Metaphors: TEDX Rosemerry Trommer
Looking at the Photo from Twelve Years Ago
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged death, love, mother, photo, son on December 15, 2021| 8 Comments »
Tonight I stare at the photo
of you and me and the cat
and the wooden train tracks
and I can’t stop marveling how
your head angles so neatly
into my shoulder, how my
body angles so easily into
yours. And I see how, even
now, after you’re gone,
I am still angling toward you,
my whole self somehow
defined by the space
where you’ve been. Today,
someone asked if it
was too hard to think
of the happy memories.
No. I love them. And I love,
impossibly, the hardest
of memories, too. It is
so easy now to love
the all of you. Remember
how many times we built
those wooden tracks?
And then pulled them apart,
only to build them again?
What isn’t a teacher for love?
Even then we were learning
about dead ends. Even then
we were learning how things
circle, how things change.
Revival
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged death, life, Mirabai Starr, mother, son on December 14, 2021| 12 Comments »
The day your son died, the person you were died, too.
—Mirabai Starr
Death came to her
as a blue sky day,
as a feral scream,
as an ambulance
with no need
for its siren.
Death came to her
saying, “Ma’am,
you don’t want
to see your son
this way.” Death
knew what it
was doing when
it erased everything
she’d thought
about how to meet
a day, when it scraped
her of who
she had been
and left her barren.
It was habit
that made her
brush her teeth,
routine that helped
her drive the car.
But it was life itself
that inspirited
her, slipping
like starlight
into her every
dark cell, life itself
that whispered
to her death-bent heart,
You are not done
yet with your
loving.
*
this poem has been published in ONE ART
If I Can’t Have You In Person, Then
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cat, grief, love, mother, son on December 11, 2021| 10 Comments »
Tonight your absence
is a long-haired cat—
circling me, nudging me,
curling in my lap
and deciding to stay.
Is it strange to say
I love the presence
of your absence—
not the fact you are gone,
but the way it reminds me
I have made a life
of loving you—a choice
I will again and again make.
This is what I want:
To be awed by how
you still teach me
to love;
to be inspired
by how you still insist
I meet life as it is,
not life the way
I wish it would be.
I want to hold out my arms
and lean into the spaces
you’ve left behind.
I want to be as close
to your memory
as this cat in my lap—
how it molds to my shape,
how it makes of my body
a home.
Ode to the Saltine Cracker
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged food, grief, mother, son, tears on December 9, 2021| 12 Comments »
Oh, salty square,
oh, bite that turns
to savory paste,
oh, flaky wafers
stacked in long
white plastic sleeves,
you fed the boy
who could never
eat enough,
attended him
through online school,
travelled with him
in his book-laden backpack,
fueled him as he
researched twin-
turbocharged V-8 engines
and fawned over
Italian luxury cars.
Finding you today
out of place
on the shelf beside
my thesaurus,
an unopened box,
I crumpled,
longing for the boy
who would have opened you.
I’d love to clean
your stupid crumbs
from the couch.
All afternoon, I taste it,
this daily salt
that falls to my lips.
Gonna Rise Up Singing
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged beauty, cause and effect, daughter, eternity, mother, singing on November 15, 2021| 4 Comments »
What we do now echoes into eternity.
—Marcus Aurelius
If what we do now echoes into eternity,
then let there be more mornings such as this one
in which my mother wakes me by singing
a thin thread of melody
that praises the beauty of the day.
By breakfast, I feel the small reverberations
of her joy as they ricochet in me
chiming against loss and fear,
an unabashed gladness that rings
against the holy ribs,
that spirals inside the aortal caves,
that peals through the chasms of the hours.
By afternoon, it’s coruscating, resonating,
a bit of aural shine against the day’s ache,
helping me meet the world just
a bit more brightly.
Just think, after an eternity, how much
beauty might have come from one
simple tune sung by one open heart
willing to sing for one moment what is true.
I Didn’t Think I Could Do It
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged acceptance, dark, grief, light, mother, softening, son on November 15, 2021| 22 Comments »
But I found myself
rigid in the room where my son
took his life. And I sat
on the floor in the doorway
where he had last sat,
where his blood had pooled
and the air had briefly smelled
of burning. I sat there
beneath the wall
where the bullet had made
its narrow hole. I sat there
with my coil of sorrow.
I didn’t want to meet it.
I desperately wanted to meet it.
I wanted to give sorrow space.
I wanted to crawl inside it.
I wanted to be anywhere
but there on the dark wood floor
in the night dark room,
and I wanted to be wholly,
completely, obliteratingly there.
Fear-ridden, ferocious,I met it all,
felt the current pushing through.
Acceptance is a filament
that takes our resistance
and makes it bright,
makes it luminous enough
that we might see ourselves
exactly as we are.
I did not find my son
in that doorway. Perhaps
I had hoped I would.
But I saw the light
that came with me.
I softened into that light.
Condition
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged body, gratitude, grief, mother on November 8, 2021| 10 Comments »
My body, thank you for carrying this ache,
for carrying it not like a burden, but like a baby—
like a gift, like something that will
change you and keep changing you forever.
Of course, you would want to shut down,
to close, to contract,
but I see how the grief grows you.
Though it shreds your sleep,
though it drops you to the floor,
you learn what it is to be a mother.
Through no effort of your own,
you are on board for a miracle.
So big, this invitation to love. Oh body,
you would never ask for this, and yet
you meet this grief every moment.
You find inner doors you never knew were there
and you swing them open, not to rid yourself
of the ache, but to grant it full access,
to know the grief completely,
to let it rewrite you, remake you, rebirth you,
to let it teach you what it means
be alive.
Talking with My Daughter about Grief
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dark, daughter, grief, light, mother on November 2, 2021| 8 Comments »
We lie in the dark
and speak about anything
but what I ache to speak about.
Some part of me longs
to find the words like search lights
that will help us find
what we don’t yet know
we are looking for.
Or a black light
that might help us see
what is valuable right here,
but invisible to our ordinary eyes.
I try to infuse my words
with candlelight, but somehow
even this feels too brash,
too aggressive, and so
we lie in the dark
and I let the moon
do all the talking,
oh waning crescent,
you know when to shine,
when to simply be held
by the dark.
One Boy
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged death, ghosts, loss, mother, son on October 30, 2021| 9 Comments »
Today the heart is full of ghosts—
one doing backflips and one
eating ice cream and one throwing
rocks in the river. One drops
a camera into a lily pond while trying
to take a picture. One peels apples
and one rides on my hip and one
sings country songs. One lights a candle
and one blows it out and one spends hours
arguing about which of the ghosts is most right.
And one is never satisfied. And one
has a thousand dull gray eyes. And one,
one whispers, I’ve got this, Mom.
And I turn to them all, one at a time,
and say welcome, you’re all welcome here.
Even the ghost who slams the door.
Even the ghost who bristles, who swears.
Ghost playing drums. Ghost aiming
nerf guns. Ghost wearing button down shirts.
Ghost with a brain made for zeros and ones.
Ghost with hands in the dirt.
And the heart expands to hold them all—
or were its corridors already stretched?
Straight A ghost. Red canoe ghost. Ghost
of the man I’ll never know. Ghost
who sits beside me at the table,
who says nothing, sipping sweet tea.
Ghost who tucks me into bed, then
slips into my dreams.
These Days When the Veils Are Thin
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged car, death, grief, mother, son, stars, vision on October 28, 2021| 5 Comments »
Leaning into the vastness
of the star drunk sky,
my heart a vehicle,
to my surprise
I heard a small click,
like the sound of a car door
opening,
and your voice,
Mom, hop in.
Let’s take a spin.
I startle, as if
waking from a dream,
heart pounding,
astonished to find you
in the driver’s seat
as you love to be, and me
just one yes away
from a joy ride
through the universe,
if only I can find
the door.
Ambush
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged absence, grief, mother, orange juice, shopping, son on October 21, 2021| 6 Comments »
It was the orange juice aisle that did it.
I stood there staring at cartons
I knew I wouldn’t buy because you
are gone. My son, I stumble on you
everywhere you are not. Which is everywhere.
The only way to learn how to meet
your absence is by meeting it.
In the car. At the table. In the yard.
On the phone. At the school.
And there in the orange juice aisle
where I stared at the cartons on the shelf
then walked on, the cart still empty.
The Gift
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged death, food, fruit, grief, love, mother, pomegranate, ripening, son on October 21, 2021| 6 Comments »
It still had its leaves on it,
the pomegranate she handed me.
And holding that smooth red sphere
in my palm, I felt not only
the jeweled weight of each bright seed,
but also the weight of the many nights
the fruit had hung on the tree,
felt how the nights had slowed the growth
so the fruit could develop more sugar.
Not all things get to ripen.
Oh, this small gift of sweetness.
How it opened in me such red tenderness—
the memory of a boy learning how
to open and eat a pomegranate,
scarlet juice trickling down his chin.
And now. I hold it in awe,
this beautiful thick-skinned globe,
hold it less like a fruit,
hold it more like a love
I was just beginning to know.
Reconciling
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged death, loss, math, mother, reconciling, son on October 12, 2021| 18 Comments »
And there on the statement,
between the hardware store expense
and the do-it-yourself car wash,
was the charge
for Henderson and Sons Funeral Home.
How to reconcile this tide of loss?
Nowhere in my books
is a column for devastation.
No account for anguish,
for the loss of a slender young man
who loved ice cream
and cherries and helped me
roast pumpkins for pie.
There’s no way this number
on the statement can equate
to the boy who threw rocks in the river,
who snuggled with me
on the couch before school,
who built cars out of cardboard
and shish kebob sticks.
I can’t make it equal the seventeen years
we swam and hiked and baked
and sang—nor the years
he wept and raged and ached,
those years I learned how to pray.
In these unmoored days,
when I am more driftwood than boat,
I float through the churning wreckage of hope
and beg myself, stay open.
I lack the callous math
for such reconciliations.
I sob into the columns,
and the heart takes the lead—
it knows nothing of counting, of sums.
It knows only to love, to love.
Physics of Grief
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged grief, igbo, mother, peace, physics, son on October 10, 2021| 8 Comments »
Before I could feel grief’s full weight,
love came to meet it, and though love did not
take away the grief, not even a picogram,
it dispersed the grief into its smallest bits,
as if to increase the surface area interface
so now every single atom of grief
is surrounded, is cushioned by love.
My friend offers me words in Igbo.
Udo diri, he says. There is peace, somehow.
How, when my bright beamish boy is dead?
Yet here in the unlikely physics of grief,
love holds so tenderly each smallest bit,
and somehow, my boy, can you feel it? peace.
Short List of Wonders
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged belief, death, faith, miracle, mother, wonder on October 8, 2021| 13 Comments »
Years from now,
I want to remember
the way tears
became white doves
and flew away,
the way stepping stones
appeared to help me
cross an impossible
river, the way
a crumpled letter arrived
from the dead
to proclaim
I am surrounded with joy.
Oh woman who lives
in my skin years from now,
don’t try to pretend
it didn’t happen.
It did. A rainbow
blossomed above
your shoulder.
Your head opened up
to receive golden light.
Life wrapped its strong hands
around your heart.
And when you asked
your son, Are you close,
you felt against your ribs
a knocking
from the inside.
After Reading a Romance at Midnight
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged book, death, love, mother, romance, son, tragedy on October 7, 2021| 7 Comments »
For two hours, I am the woman
who works at the orphanage, the woman
who falls in love with a man from India
who is not who he says he is.
He and I make love for hours beneath a mirror,
twining our limbs in a sea of silk,
and he shows me the pleasure
of losing the stories I’ve told myself
about what is possible with love.
When, after many pages,
we arrive at happily ever after,
I find myself on the couch in my kitchen,
notice my own thick legs curled beneath me,
my own raw heart in my tired chest
doing its faithful work. I’m surprised
to return to my own story:
the woman who is grieving—
the woman alone
in the empty room who listens
for the voice that isn’t there,
who listens for footsteps that do not come.
For the last two hours, I had forgotten her,
had forgotten this woman
whose story I know as my own,
this woman who lost her son.
I had forgotten the ache she carries,
the constant throb. And though it cuts,
though it wounds,
I am so grateful to return to her life,
to her story—the story
of how she gave her everything
to someone she loved,
how she knows he loved her, too.
It’s not a story she had wanted to live,
but now that it’s hers
she would never give up a page
of their story. Not a single word.
*
this poem has been published in ONE ART
Saint Francis and Sister Death
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged acceptance, death, mother, saint francis, son on October 6, 2021| 15 Comments »
As Francis lay dying
in his humble hut,
he wrote a praise poem
that honored Sister Death.
And when death came
to dance with him,
he did not shun her
nor shame her nor
push her away.
He embraced her
the way he embraced
the sun, the wind,
the water, the air.
He claimed her as family,
as dance partner, guide.
Oh Francis, here
in the hut of my heart
is a wooden box of ashes
about the size of a baby.
I can cradle it, carry it,
sway with it slow
the way I once did
with the boy in the box, now dust,
the boy the coroner
swaddled in white.
I did not want this dance.
I stumble. I trip.
I am awkward, ungainly.
Sister Death is certain, serene.
I would have barred
the doors if I could have, Francis,
but now she walks with me,
sleeps with me, makes
dinner and cleans with me.
There is no locking her out.
She brings me the costliest gifts:
Trust in life. Immeasurable love.
Perfume of the great mystery.
I tell her I’d trade them all back
for my son. She whispers,
Oh, sister. Dance with me.
When in Rome
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged georgia, mother, parenting, son, time, walking on August 12, 2021| 1 Comment »
What a loss it would be
to not have born so I
would have missed a
Thursday night like this
in which my son and I
walk the dark streets
in Georgia and watch
the lightning transform
the sky into pink flares
and smell some sweet
unnamable flower and
talk about Dodge Chargers
and knees and roaches—
I swear it has all been
worth it, every second
of fifty-one years, for this
hour in which there
are no bells, no shoulds,
no other tugs except
to take the next step
down the centerline
together
while in the distance,
raps another clap
of thunder.