I want it to be said
I was the kind of woman
who would weep in the concert hall,
undone by the beauty of song.
I want to be remembered
as a creature who loved
spring grass in her bare toes
and dirt in her hands
and the sun on her skin,
and I want everyone I love
to know for a fact
I chose them as my family.
I hope they will say
I loved the blank page
more than any word on it,
though I thrilled for words, too—
It was weird, they might say,
how she would sit there for hours,
days, years, wondering
about the next true thing,
letting the blank rub off on her.
She was so happy, eyes closed,
fingers hovering above the keyboard,
leaning into that moment
when anything is possible,
that edge where she learned
she had wings.
Posts Tagged ‘writing’
Rosemerry Imagines Her Funeral
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ars poetica, death, obituary, writing on March 31, 2022| 10 Comments »
Dear 2020: Let’s write about it
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged 2020, writing on May 7, 2021| Leave a Comment »
| Want to process the last year in writing? Here are three chances: Two small playshops through Wilkinson Public Library where we write and share, 12 people per class. OR a 40-minute Thoughtshop, hosted by SHYFT at Mile High, that will offer tons of poems and prompts. (Webinar format) Dear 2020: Writing to explore losses and blessings of the pandemic May 19, 6-8 MT OR May 20, 10 a.m.- noon The pandemic changed so much—how we greet each other, how we meet each other, how we work, how we play, how we move. There were huge losses—loved ones, careers, homes. And there were, for each of us, thousands of smaller losses—celebrations, vacations, events, goals, connections with family and friends, social rituals. For two hours, we’ll read and discuss and write poems (or not poems) that help us to name our griefs, meet them and honor how they have shaped us. We’ll explore, too, the silver linings and small blessings, letting poetry help us meet this moment and all that brought us here. Free. Led by poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer. Register here: https://telluridelibrary.org/events/ Re-Meeting the Self: A thoughtshop exploring losses and blessings of the pandemic May The pandemic changed so much—how we greet each other, how we meet each other, how we work, how we play, how we move. There were devastating losses of loved ones. Life-changing losses of careers, homes. And there were, for each of us, thousands of smaller losses—missed celebrations, vacations, events, goals, connections with family and friends and social rituals. In this 40-minute webinar, poet Rosemerry will read poems that help us to name our griefs, meet them and honor how they have shaped us. She will also share poems that explore silver linings and small blessings. With each poem, she’ll offer prompts for writing on your own in which we might let poetry help us meet this moment and all that brought us here. To register, https://shyftatmilehigh.punchpass.com/classes/8251189 |
Song of the Blank Page
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ars poetica, blank, paper, woman, writing on February 11, 2021| 4 Comments »
What a woman really needs
is a blank sheet of paper,
which takes trees, of course,
softwood coniferous are best—
pines, firs, spruce, hemlock.
Their long fibers produce the strongest paper
able to hold the most difficult words.
And the tree needs sunlight, clean air, water.
And the tree must be cut using a chainsaw,
harvester, feller buncher. Must be moved
with a skidder or a forwarder.
Must be transported to the sawmill on a truck:
So many machines run by so many
human hands attached to human limbs
with human hearts and human hurts
and human hopes.
And of course, the woman
needs a pen for writing on the paper—
the ink no longer coming from soot
but from pigment including a solvent, a binder,
and a plethora of additives
such as chelating and drying agents—
a complex concoction suited to giving clarity
to complex thoughts.
She needs a room. Or a closet. A counter?
Or simply entry to an inner place
where there are no other voices
asking for help or offering help either.
A space where the predominant voice
she hears is her own—or perhaps,
more truly, the voice she is ripening into,
the voice that emerges when she lets the blank page
know more than she does, lets it lead her
on cursive paths that cross themselves often
but move her ever forward.
And then, with that clean sheet full of memories,
that pen with its synthesized balance,
that room with its impossible blessing,
she might at last meet what she really needs most,
that part of herself she will forever
continue to wonder about, that self
that reaches for her, that asks her to wrestle,
invites her to see what else she might find
in all that abundant blank.
Things You Didn’t Want to Play
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged childhood, loneliness, play, writing on October 2, 2020| 6 Comments »
Like Monopoly. Because you always ended up landing on Boardwalk
where the red hotel meant you owed two thousand dollars
and all you had were mortgaged railroads. Or like checkers,
because really, what was fun about moving small plastic disks
diagonally and hearing the other kid say, “King me.” And soccer?
Only because your mother made you because she wanted
to be coach. You did want to play school, but no one else did,
so you were the principal, the teacher, the student,
giving yourself homework, grading it yourself. Writing in red
in your best cursive at the top of the page, “See me.”
You didn’t want to play basketball, because no one else
ever chose you for their team. Even though you were tall.
And you were chosen last for volleyball, too. And t-ball.
And Red Rover. And dodge ball. Is it any wonder your favorite
way to play was to visit the junkyard and find treasure?
Or to walk along the lake to look for flowers and worms?
Is it any wonder you learned to love playing alone
in quiet rooms with an empty page and a pen?
There was no way then you could have known
that it would save you—no, you just thought
you were playing the only way you knew how,
walking through the only doors
you knew how to open yourself.
So I Picked Up My Pen Again
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged fear, good enough, love, motivation, writing on September 21, 2020| 8 Comments »
with thanks to Rebecca Mullen
but what if I can’t do enough
I said, and love said
what if you don’t try?
One Long Story
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ars poetica, blank, writing on September 13, 2020| 2 Comments »
hovering over
the generous blank
the pen wonders how to improve
on all that potential—
oasis without a trail
Proxy
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ars poetica, despair, news, writing on July 13, 2020| 9 Comments »
The woman who knows what to write
did not show up today. Perhaps she’s gone
hiking amongst the blue larkspur, or
maybe she’s pulling weeds in the garden.
Perhaps she got a job as a counselor or a priest,
or decided to run for political office.
I wish she’d show up again. Sometimes
it’s not easy to face the blank, to believe
there are any words worth writing. Like today,
when I read about how the abandoned fracking wells
are leaking pollutants. How today will be
the first federal execution in seventeen years.
How there are still children at the border
still crying, “¡Mami!” and “¡Papá!”
Perhaps she was simply so sad
that she went to sit in a corner, quietly,
not to forget, but to find the strength to meet it.
Perhaps she is, even now, trying to conjure
the words that might actually make a difference.
Fortunate
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged fortune cookie, generosity, writing on April 11, 2020| 6 Comments »
Tonight, I want to break into the fortune cookie factory
armed with millions of tiny rectangular papers
that I’d surreptitiously slip into the thin folded wafers.
You will say five nice things in the next hour, says one.
And, You’ll bake something nice for your neighbor.
Every fortune will predict a generosity of spirit.
A grudge you’ve been gripping will disappear.
Gratitude for the smallest things will flood you.
And on the back, it will acknowledge that to make
any number lucky, you’ll simply write a check
using that number to a local charity—
the more zeroes you add to the number,
the luckier that number will be.
Or, perhaps a better idea:
fill each cookie with a blank slip of paper—
some small scrap of potential that invites every person
to write their own fortune, lets them feel
like the author of their own destiny. In fact, here.
Here’s a pen. And a very small white page.
You don’t even need the cookie.
A Letter to the Woman in My Calendar
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged calendar, Corona Virus, fiction, reality, self, writing on April 1, 2020| Leave a Comment »
Dear Other Version of Myself,
In my calendar, it’s April second
and you are going to an event tonight
at a bookstore in another town
where the people will gather
and hug each other and taste
each other’s wine. You live in a world
that no longer exists, and every day
I try to reconcile it—how you
had plans to go camping next weekend,
how you were going to go to the theater
with no mask, no gloves,
no sense of your body as a weapon.
Every day, your life, which once was my life,
seems increasingly impossible.
Every day, these two worlds are farther apart—
the one in which you were getting on a plane
to visit your mother
and the one in which I put on rubber gloves
to go to the post office box.
I remember how seldom you washed
your hands for fear that someone you love
would die. I remember what it was like
to hug my friends with no worry
of harming them, to go to a restaurant,
to plan for a day past tomorrow.
Who’s Missing at the Table?
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged braided way, conversation, politics, writing on January 31, 2020| 4 Comments »
I’m so grateful to Braided Way for sharing this poem today …
In a time of national crisis, what our country really needs is a good poem.
—Herbert Hoover
This is the time when we must say to the stranger,
the other, sit here. Notice how difficult it can be
to even come to the same table, how hard
to look the other in the eye. Something in us screams,
“Right, I am right.” And it is hard to hear the voice
beneath that scream, a whisper of a gospel that says
nothing at all.
This is the time when we must say to ourselves,
I am also the stranger, when we must look
in the mirror and not know who it is we see—
someone capable of being more courageous,
more compassionate, more devoted, more
astonishingly vulnerable and connected
than we ever knew ourselves to be. Who
is that stranger in the mirror, we must ask,
and vow to never let her down.
This is the time when we must write the poems
our country needs, the poem that builds the bridge
from truth to truth and never touches the river
of lies. The poem that allows our country
to fall in love with itself again, the poem
with enough places set at its table
that everyone knows they have a place to sit
and the rest of us know when that person is missing
because their chair is empty.
This is the time for the beauty that passes
all understanding, a testament of goodness
that cannot be contained, a congress of delight.
This is the time to pick up your pen
and with your most tender, most beautiful,
most ferocious self,
fight.