hovering over
the generous blank
the pen wonders how to improve
on all that potential—
oasis without a trail
Posts Tagged ‘writing’
One Long Story
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ars poetica, blank, writing on September 13, 2020| 2 Comments »
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.
One More Reason to Kiss More Now
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged carpe diem, death, kissing, Michelangelo, poem, poetry, writing on February 10, 2019| Leave a Comment »
Michelangelo wrote his love
forty-eight funeral epigrams—
not one of them brought back
the shoulders like chiseled marble,
the purr of his voice, his lips raw silk
One Impasse
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ars poetica, paradox, poem, poetry, vulnerability, writing on September 12, 2018| Leave a Comment »
One Odd Gift
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged fragility, poem, poetry, second chance, writing on March 15, 2016| 2 Comments »
calligraphy in the sand—
every time the wind blows
the chance to write more beautifully
Free Writing Class for Women Tomorrow Night in Telluride
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged poetry class, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, Telluride, writing on February 9, 2015| 2 Comments »
Tuesday, February 10
Going Out, Going In: Sneak Peak
Wilkinson Public Library, 6-8 p.m.
Telluride, CO
First, we play. That is the premise of the four-day art and writing retreat I will be teaching with artist Brucie Holler. So as a teaser for our retreat at Ah Haa, this sneak peak program is chance to be light with yourself, with your inner critic, and with other women who are interested in words. Nothing serious. Nothing intimidating. We’ll read fun and funny poems by other women, and write a few, too … it’s a great gift to give to yourself, and it’s free! For more information, go to http://www.telluridelibrary.org/ or contact Elissa at the library, 970-728-4519 x147 or edickson@telluridelibrary.org .
Eight
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged allowing, blank page, god, haiku, learning, losing, paying attention, poems, writing on January 10, 2012| 6 Comments »
did it just start to
sing, that brown bird, or did I
just start to listen?
*
a night of fretting,
but the day comes in with a
cartwheel
*
that letter so much
more precious now that I
have lost it
*
once I took all the
books off the shelves, God arrived
with a blank page
*
today
the leaf just
a leaf
*
no pillow tonight!
the poem just grabbed a drum
and crooked its finger
*
but I don’t know how
to fly, I said, and God said,
start by falling
*
still cupped in my hands
this song hummed to me
seven years ago