Count the one beautiful blue and green planet.
Count it again.
Say “home,” then marvel at the taste of tears.
Notice how no borders matter from here.
Remember how important they feel
when standing on a border. Once
you dreamt of being alone. Of being
far away from parking lots and grocery store lines
and men with guns and violent conviction.
Now you dream of touching someone else,
of breathing in the scent of garden dirt,
of hearing a voice without static, of lying down
in a bed, held by your own sweet gravity.
What you would do to taste a tree-ripened peach.
Give up on counting stars. Draw lines between them,
creating your own constellations:
The open hand. The river gorge. The crooked evergreen.
A semi-automatic rifle, which you re-constellate
into a small bouquet of lilies. Consider forgiveness.
Wonder how long it will take before it feels authentic.
Circling has taught you how things come around.
Remember? There was a time you didn’t think
you knew how to pray.
Posts Tagged ‘space’
In Orbit
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aloneness, earth, prayer, space, violence on March 26, 2021| 6 Comments »
One Review
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged judgment, satisfaction, space, stars on July 25, 2020| Leave a Comment »
asked to rate my satisfaction
from one to five stars—
trying to submit the milky way
Together
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged kindness, personal responsibility, perspective, poem, space, togetherness on July 19, 2020| 11 Comments »
It smacks me, sometimes,
how connected we are—
though we draw boundaries,
build walls, fight wars,
call names, and kill. All it takes
is a photo of earth from space
and I’m stunned again,
how much we are in this together.
And though we’d rather not know it,
every choice we make
affects everyone, everything else.
Perhaps this is why I weep
when the woman I’ve barely met
embroiders me a sweater
with a word she knows I’ll love
and then brings it to my home.
Because it’s proof of kindness,
a confirmation that beauty
not only exists, it will lead us to each other.
How easily two strangers
might become friends.
It can happen anywhere
on this small blue and green planet—
anywhere two people co-exist,
the invitation to be generous,
thoughtful, to think of new ways
to be good to each other.
Each kindness a bridge that spans
the world’s flaws. Each moment,
another chance to build another bridge.
It Comes Down to This
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, loss of self, love, protons, science, space on February 8, 2020| 5 Comments »
Not that I want to be someone else,
just that I want to be less myself,
which is to say less the woman
who thinks she knows anything
about anything—gardening or writing
or skiing or parenting or loving—
I want to be less who I am and
more what a tree is, what a star is,
protons fused with other protons,
and the strong force that holds
particles together in the center of atoms,
and the weak force that breaks the atoms down,
and the electromagnetic force that binds
all molecules. Yes, this is how I want to meet you,
without a name, unencumbered by a me,
a collection of atoms and forces that rhyme
with you, linked as we are from the very beginning.
How easy it is then to say hello, to fall in love
with each other, the world.
Monday Night: A Portrait
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged astronaut, dinner, food, poem, poetry, prolepsis, space on January 13, 2020| 5 Comments »
You are not a passive observer in the cosmos. The entire universe is expressing itself through you at this very minute.
—Deepak Chopra
Even as she made the cauliflower soup,
she was a deep space explorer.
No one else in the room seemed to notice
she was floating. No one noticed
how gravity had no hold on her.
No, they only saw she was chopping onions,
noticed how the act made her cry. How was it
did they not hear her laughter, astonished
as she was by her own weightlessness,
by the way she could move in any direction?
Perhaps the novelty explains why
she forgot to turn off the stove,
untethered as she was to anything.
It’s a miracle she sat at the dinner table at all,
what, with the awareness that she was surrounded
by planets, spiral galaxies, black holes, moons. Yes,
miracle, she thought as she tasted the soup,
and noticed deep space not just around,
but inside her: supernovae, constellations,
interstellar dust,
the glorious, immeasurable dark.
Space Exploration
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged inner journey, poem, poetry, science, space on August 11, 2019| 5 Comments »
Perhaps one day they will find the way
to take all the empty space out of our atoms—
condense us to our essence. Then
the whole of the human race would fit
inside a sugar cube. It would serve us right,
expansive buggers that we are, we who stamp
our atoms all over the earth, we who now
leave our footprints in space.
Like our electrons, we exist too many
places at once. Or, perhaps one day,
we’ll learn to embrace all that space within us,
and instead of plundering, conquering, developing out,
we’ll go in, travel in, enter grace.
Poet’s Respond in Rattle!
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged math, numbers, poem, poetry, poets respond, Rattle, space, Voyager 2 on December 14, 2018| 2 Comments »
Hi friends,
the poem from a few days ago about the Voyager 2 leaving our heliosphere, “By the Numbers,” was accepted last night by Rattle.com for their series Poets Respond, poems about the news. Here is a link to the text and audio!
Permanent
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged poem, poetry, possession, space on April 30, 2017| 4 Comments »
In the corner of the closet
in permanent marker
I wrote in small letters
“this room belongs
to Rosemerry Wahtola
forever and ever, no matter
who else lives here.”
The room had been built
for me in the basement
by my father, and I loved
its orange carpet, its
subterranean dark,
the way I could close
the door and be entirely alone.
The room was not mine,
no more than the mountains
are mine, these mountains
I love for their openness,
their long trails, their cliffs,
their secret glades.
No, it is always we
who belong to the spaces
that hold us, though
they change, they mark us
invisibly, they write
on our inner walls,
as if to say you are mine,
child, forever.
When I Drop the Stubbornness
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged allowing, love, marriage, poem, poetry, space on December 25, 2013| 1 Comment »
When I Drop the Stubbornness
All day I practice
noticing the space
between us, feeling
the subtle tugs, the
repulsions, the charge,
the release. Sometimes
I forget to let it happen,
try to force a nearness or
a solitude. That is when
I can feel it, how real
the space is, almost as if
you are one and I am another
and the space between us
is a third. I have noticed
that when you and I,
at the same time, allow
ourselves to lean—
is that the right word?—
perhaps it is more that we
open to that space,
then I notice how easy it is
to be for each other
as the water is for the moon,
holding entirely without
holding at all, not changing
and utterly transformed.
While Not Sleeping
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged change, poem, poetry, space on October 23, 2013| 4 Comments »
All night the river
touched my body,
not with its long dark
tongues of chill but with
its thousand thousand
thousand audible waves
all lapping without stopping
rearranging me. Perhaps it
is always this way. Perhaps
we are always being
changed, only we are too busy
to notice it. In the morning mirror
I looked the same, but I knew
different. Perhaps you
have felt it, too, this
absence moving through,
the space it leaves
in its wake.