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Posts Tagged ‘tenderness’

Why Tenderness? Cinepoem from Risking Love

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , 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)

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Watching the Goslings

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , 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.

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In the Garden in October

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , 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.

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The Unsheathed

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , 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.

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After the Nightmare

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , 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. 
 

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Falling All the Way In

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , 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.

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Into the Questions

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , 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? 

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Learning to Be Soft

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on September 18, 2023| 5 Comments »

      for my father
 
 
He was a large man, but soft,
his body no longer chiseled
from football, from youth.
To be held by him
was to be enveloped,
to be cradled, to feel wrapped
in his presence. He was soft.
Except, of course, when he wasn’t.
I had seen his anger turn steel,
turn sword. I knew the full weight
of his no. Perhaps that is why
I knew the great value of how soft
he was with me. I was shaped
as much by his tenderness
as I was by the firmness of his rules,
shaped by the warmth in his voice,
shaped by his gentleness
when I confessed my darkest shame.
 
One night, when I came to him, broken,
scared of the ways I had hurt others
and myself, he did not rail,
did not blame, did not speak in claws
or spears. He spoke in gauze,
in salve, in velvet cushion,
and though it would be years
before the wounds were healed,
the healing began that night.
In softness.
 
I remember, even now,
how he held me—
how his softness invited my own.
How I still feel him, holding me—
his softness, my softness.
our strength
 

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The Sublime

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on September 30, 2022| 5 Comments »




In the middle of the night
in a tiny well-lit kitchen
in the middle of a city
known for violence,
my father spent hours
combing my hair
looking for nits,
meticulously pulling through
the toxic shampoo.
The hours passed
with tenderness.
I was grateful then,
but could not know
how sweetly I would come to recall
his patient hands, his quiet devotion,
his exhaustion, my exhaustion,
could not know how
years later I would treasure
those dark hours
when the sirens
blared through the window glass
and hour after hour
came to pass.

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An Open Thank You Letter to Kristen Who Works at the Cemetery

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on September 24, 2022| 14 Comments »




Her smile was clear sky, was green grass,
was slender stream of waterfall.
Her smile said, You are welcome here.
Her smile said, You are not alone.

She waved to me as I climbed the hill
to sit by the grave of my son and she offered
to water the flowers I’d brought from the garden.
Her offer was pink snapdragon, was orange marigold,
was golden calendula. Her offer said,
There are some things we can do.
Her offer said, I see you.

Thank you, I said. Thank you
 for taking care of this place.
I looked around at the trim lawn,
the lovely, well-cared for space
where we bring our dead.
She shrugged and smiled and said,
We love Finn, and backed away,
her right hand pressed to her heart,
her eyes embracing mine.

There are moments so flooded with tenderness
every wall around our heart collapses
from the beauty of it,
and we are left wet and trembling, like newborns.
There are moments when we are so naked
love enters us completely, shakes us from within
and wrecks us, and there,
in the rubble of our defenses
we fall so deeply in love with life,
with the goodness of people,
we are remade.

When I left, she blew me a kiss.
I caught it. Twelve hours later,
I still cradle that kiss in my hand.

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