for Paula
With one fingertip
I drew gentle spirals
on the smooth, bare
skin where only weeks
ago her hair had been
and her eyes fell closed
and her breathing slowed
and I felt her whole body
soften, felt how strong,
how brave she has had
to be for so long, so long.
How I loved her then
in that moment when
she let me see beneath
the smile, beneath
the shine, beneath
the laugh. How I loved
her then when she let
me in, how honest
her exhaustion,
how precious,
how rare,
her trust.
Posts Tagged ‘tenderness’
In that Tender Moment
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged cancer, friendship, honesty, tenderness, trust on February 22, 2026| 6 Comments »
Everywhere
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ache, beauty, tenderness on February 14, 2026| 4 Comments »
Tenderness pierces the heart
the way a bright stream of sunlight
pierces evening clouds,
the way the green stem of garlic
pierces cold spring soil.
It pierces the heart the way protests
for justice pierce silence.
If anyone asks, where does it hurt,
the truest answer is everywhere.
If anyone asks, where can I find
beauty enough to make me weep,
the answer is the same.
Cast of Millions
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged audition, dream, movie, tenderness on February 9, 2026| 6 Comments »
There, on the dream marquis,
in big black all caps
were three words:
DEAR PEOPLE DARE.
I stood on the dream sidewalk
staring up into the vast
dream dark and thought,
someone made a movie
about tenderness—
real people finding courage
to offer love and care
to those who are wounded.
Which is all of us.
That’s when I woke,
determined to audition
for that show every day
for the rest of my life.
Why Tenderness? Cinepoem from Risking Love
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged astronomy, cinepoem, neutron star, Risking Love, tenderness on September 18, 2025| 2 Comments »
You never know what someone else is going through.
Please—share this video. With a friend. With your family. With a colleague.
RISKING LOVE audio by Steve Law. Video by Holiday Mathis. Poem by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer. To purchase RISKING LOVE, visit here.
Spotify: here Deezer: here Pandora: here Apple Music: here YouTube Music: here
To see all the videos on the album visit here.
“Watching My Friend Pretend Her Heart Isn’t Breaking” is the fifteenth and final track on RISKING LOVE, a spoken-word album that explores how we might fall more deeply in love with the world as it is, even when that seems impossible.
Watching My Friend Pretend Her Heart Isn’t Breaking
On Earth, just a teaspoon of neutron star
would weigh six billion tons. Six billion tons
equals the collective weight of every animal
on earth. Including the insects. Times three.
Six billion tons sounds impossible
until I consider how it is to swallow grief—
just a teaspoon and one might as well have consumed
a neutron star. How dense it is,
how it carries inside it the memory of collapse.
How difficult it is to move then.
How impossible to believe that anything
could lift that weight.
There are many reasons to treat each other
with great tenderness. One is
the sheer miracle that we are here together
on a planet surrounded by dying stars.
One is that we cannot see what
anyone else has swallowed.
—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, from All the Honey (Samara Press, 2023)
Watching the Goslings
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged birds, goslings, hopelessness, tenderness on May 29, 2025| 2 Comments »
Those milky, down-fluffy, bumblesome
bodies stumbling in tall green grass—
just seeing the goslings, I feel it, a rush
of tenderness, an inexorable
softening. Not that I brought
my hopelessness here on purpose.
Just that I seem to always carry it
with me these days. Not that the baby
geese make anything better.
Except they do, opening me to the story
of life beyond myself, beyond my kind.
Suddenly I sense it everywhere,
the great story. There, in the bitter
scent of the chokecherry; there,
in the stonefly climbing the coyote willow;
there, in the eagle that would eat the rabbit.
Everywhere the story of what it is
to be alive. And in me, a tenderness
for all of it, a tenderness that grows and grows
until I can be tender even with my own
hopelessness, my own bumbling. No antidote
for humanness, but oh, this tenderness.
In the Garden in October
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged garden, gratefulness, snap pea, tenderness on October 14, 2024| 8 Comments »
Though the vines are almost all brittle and dried,
somehow I find four perfect sugar snap peas
at the top of the fence. Not tough. Not pale
with age, but sweet and crisp and stringless,
and I pull them into my mouth with delight
as if I am eating the word yes. Aren’t they amazing?
I say, holding the last snap pea up to the sunflowers
where they hang heavy and dead on their stalks.
I want to offer this pea to the world like a small proof
of pleasure—some evidence that life persists
despite cold, despite exhaustion,
though the light itself seems to be failing,
but here, look in my hand, this testament to tenderness
so full of spring, so unfathomable, so here.
The Unsheathed
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, peach, peaches, tenderness, vulnerability on August 29, 2024| 5 Comments »
Like skinning a peach,
I sometimes want to peel back
the masks of the world and myself
to uncover in each other what is
naked and glistening—
an essential sweetness
that can no longer be contained.
If it is wrong to wish this, I wish
it anyway, wish to meet each other
defenseless, with softness,
so moved by proof of how easily
our flesh is bruised, reminded
how tender with each other we must be.
After the Nightmare
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged body, love, nightmare, sleep, softness, tenderness on March 10, 2024| 2 Comments »
As if the whole world depended on it
I nestled deeper into your warmth,
made myself soft as morning light,
soft as a lullaby, softer than that,
as if wars could be stopped and
peace achieved if only I could
make of my flesh a place so safe
you could sleep.
Falling All the Way In
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, eternity, happiness, moment, mother, tenderness on January 2, 2024| 7 Comments »
Late, and I lie on the couch,
my head in mom’s lap,
eyelids heavy as she pulls
slender fingers through my hair,
and I am more loved
than lost, more soft
than strong, more flesh
than worry, more no self
than self. I am not
thinking of happiness,
which is, perhaps,
the truest kind of happiness.
The moment loses any lines
that might try to define
what a moment is
until all is suffused with eternity
and tenderness is uncontainable.
Her hands move slow
and the room is quiet
and the night is a nest
big enough to hold us all.
Into the Questions
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged compassion, conversation, love, love your enemy, pain, tenderness on November 3, 2023| 13 Comments »
I needed today the soft voice of the man
from Bethlehem saying,
Put yourself in the pain of others.
Not in their shoes, but in their pain.
I needed to see his eyes
when he said it is olive picking season
and the families are too afraid
to go to the orchards.
I needed to hear it is the hardest
his life has ever been,
needed to hear his fear, his anger,
his willingness to wonder
again and again,
What does it mean to love your enemy?
I needed to see the open face
of the man in Israel as he listened,
needed to hear his gentle tone
as he rejected the phrase us vs. them.
Needed to hear the resolve in his voice
as he called for creating an us together.
And because in the arms of terror
these two men find ways to love,
I invite a war into my heart
and imagine myself on both sides,
imagine the ache that fuels the rage.
I don’t have to imagine fear, distrust.
It is in all of us, this war,
not somewhere far away.
It is for all of us to ask in every interface,
How do I love my enemy?
How do we become an us?