Posted in Uncategorized, tagged friendship, love, poem, poetry, student, support on September 12, 2019| 2 Comments »
for Phyllis
I remember the day she chose me.
It was fall. I didn’t know then
I would come to love her, didn’t know
how trust would grow, like catnip, like oregano,
more robust, more wild every year.
I didn’t know how I’d been waiting to be chosen,
that she would help me find the wings I’d never felt,
never seen. That she would dare me to fly.
That she would be the wind.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dream, nightmare, poem, poetry, support on February 28, 2019| 7 Comments »
Some dreams are meant to wake us up.
Like the dream when the man approaches your car
and you roll down your window to ask him what he needs
and he speaks in words you don’t understand.
What? You say to him. What are you trying to tell me?
And he pulls out a chainsaw and thrusts it through the open window
and instead of recoiling, you try harder to hear
what he’s trying to say. What are you saying?
you ask him, still wanting to make sense of the man,
believing he has something important to teach you.
He is here to teach you some people are not safe.
And why is it your survival instinct is so slow to kick in?
At last you thrust the car into reverse
and swerve down the narrow road before launching
into the air and soaring, soaring away from the man,
somehow unsurprised when the car lands in a canopy
of trees. And you are unhurt in the arms of oaks.
When you wake, as you do, each time you try to return to sleep,
there’s the man again, his chainsaw reaching for you,
the evil snarl on his lips. Wake up, says the dream.
Not everyone can be trusted. Why is it so hard
to wake you up? How can the world support you
if you choose to stay with what hurts you,
if you don’t let yourself be launched?
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Montaigne, philosophy, poem, poetry, support on October 4, 2018| 3 Comments »
And when Montaigne turned thirty-eight,
he began to paint inscriptions on the roof beams
in his library. Words of Socrates.
Euripedes. Sophocles. Horace. Ecclesiastes.
Theognis. Epictetus. Lucretius. As if to keep
himself looking up. As if to remember
where the world has been. As if to know
himself as part of this glorious conversation.
And who have I painted on the roof beams
of my heart? Rumi. Neruda. Mira. Rilke.
Szymborska. Hopkins. Ahkmatova. Bass.
Every day, I climb into that tower and trace
their words with my thoughts, wander
their paths, let them hold my hand. Sometimes
they take me by the face, the way a mother
or a lover would, and hold me there as if to say,
Now listen. I mean this. I mean you.
Sometimes they stand passive, and
force me to find my own way in.
These are beams that never will burn,
the kind that hold up the sky.
Montaigne inscribed Horace, who
tells us: shelter where the storm drives you.
And wherever the storm, these beams
are there. Meanwhile, the thunder, the crackle
of lightning, the scent of the coming rain.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged friendship, poem, poetry, support, time on July 6, 2018| 5 Comments »
We are all walking each other home.
—Ram Dass
There was that moment before
I read the letter, when you
were still invincible, that moment
when just seeing your name
made me think of sitting at your table
drinking wine, eating fresh tomato soup,
and my heart rose up like a good little dog
and begged me to read the news.
And then there was the moment
when I read the news. And read it again.
And let my eyes unfocus on the words
as I felt their terrible weight
settle in my chest, on my cheeks.
How soon the mind leans toward the worst.
It is hard to reconcile the two moments
together, side by side as they were,
the one so exuberant, the other
so grim. I try to imagine them
holding hands as if to steady the other.
As if they need somehow to be close,
fear and hope. If you feel a hand
slip into yours and no one is there,
perhaps it is mine, reaching
toward you through a letter
I will always be writing, the letter
of how beautiful it is to be alive
in this world so we can
shoulder together what frightens us most.
How beautiful it is to be alive
so that even in our most lumbered days
we might meet each other, hands open,
and steady the other, walking home.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged friendship, love, parenting, poem, poetry, support on January 22, 2018| 8 Comments »
wanting to be your lifeboat
when what you really need
is someone to let you swim
and if you live nearby, you may want to consider this public speaking class I will be teaching for the next six Thursdays through Ah Haa … http://www.ahhaa.org/calendarize/public-speaking-rosemerry-wahtola-trommer/
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged fear, hope, poem, poetry, prayer, support on January 17, 2018| 13 Comments »
Because I don’t know how to pray,
I do what I know to do,
which is to sit very quietly
and let myself feel. To hold you
without holding you.
To imagine your fear
and breathe into it.
To feel my own fear
and walk the edges of its cliffs.
To lean on hope with its flimsy
net and feel how little it takes
to catch us, to save us.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ice skating, poem, poetry, support on December 30, 2017| 2 Comments »
How does it do it,
the skin of ice—
it holds our weight
we who skate
in circles around
the frozen lake.
Though it groans
and cracks,
it holds us,
this solid ground
made of what
is not always solid.
Is it too much
to hope that we, too,
might sometimes
be able to hold
the weight of others
with such clarity,
such polished grace?
Our skates carve
unreadable cursive
into the surface.
Below us, clouds blossom
in the ice—bouquets
for days such as these
when everything
seems possible,
even improbable strength,
even falling through.
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged family, illness, poem, poetry, support on July 16, 2017| Leave a Comment »
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged friendship, hardship, love, poem, poetry, sadness, support, trouble on October 26, 2012| 2 Comments »
What We Do When We Can Do Nothing Else
When trouble comes
with its long gray dress
and its hungry eyes
and its basket of woe,
when trouble comes
with its insomnia
and note past due
that you know you can never pay,
when trouble comes
with its refusal to let you
be bailed out this time
no matter how crisp
the hundreds are,
I do not want to be
the one who lies to you
and says it will all be okay.
I don’t want to play
the teacher and talk
about how the world
erodes us until we shine.
I want to be the one
who holds your hand,
though, even if it is
from many hundreds
of miles away, and
even if you do not hear me
say it, I will be thinking,
miracles happen,
and you are one.
I will write you a poem
made of doors, all
of them open,
even the one
that trouble walks in,
even the one
that trouble walks out.
