Showing posts with label Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 20, 2024

self-portrait as subordinate clause

 







and when 
the larkspur
petals fall and when
the fall begins to sing
and when the song weaves
through the loss and when
the loss dyes
everything, when
everything is
emptier and emptiness
is whole somehow, when
whole is what a life 
does, when life is
what is now, when
now is
ever changing
and changing knows
no end, when
any ending
I might seek is
just another
when



~ Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
from All The Honey



Thursday, June 8, 2023

making it right: a prophecy

 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
The duty of a musician is for us to take anything that
happens on stage and make it part of the music.
 
~ Herbie Hancock 
 
 
No wrong notes in jazz, said the musician
and the poet insisted, no wrong words,
No wrong leaf, said the tree,
and field said, no wrong grass.
No wrong time, promised the friend,
and the river said, no wrong rock.
And the heart said, no wrong love,
but the mind said, no, that's wrong.
And the wrong love replanted itself like grass
and grew wild in all the wrong places
like a gorgeous weed, like a tap-rooted song
until the whole field was beautifully wrong, wrong.
 
 
 
~ Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
from All the Honey
 
 
 

Wednesday, May 31, 2023

how healing comes

 
 
 
 

 
 
 

Healing comes less like a falcon
            with mighty wings,
                        and more like an earthworm
            that slowly, slowly moves
beneath it all, tightening up,
            then stretching out, tightening up
                        and stretching out, a simple
            two-part rhythm. Some days,
that is all the body can do.
            Contract. Expand. Contract. Expand.
                        In the meantime, through this
            artless act, what is dense
becomes porous.
            In the meantime, what is stuck
                        and clotted gets moved around.
            What is dead passes through,
is processes by the grit inside.
            There are tunnels now in the soil of me,
                        thin channels of recovery-
            a blessed loosening,
a gradual renewal, It's unhurried, but
            I feel it, the air, the rain
                        the life coming in.
 
 
 
 
 
~ Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
    from All the Honey 
 
 
 
 

filling my purse with commas

 
 
 
 
 

 
 
All afternoon, each time
I think I should hurry,
I pull out a comma,
 
such humble punctuation,
and I invite it into the moment,
and the comma does
 
what it always does, which
is to invite a pause, a small pause,
of course, but a pause long enough
 
to breathe, to notice what else
is happening, a slight
suggestion that right here
 
is a perfect place to rest,
yes, how funny I never noticed
before that the comma itself
 
looks as if it;s bowing, nodding
its small dark head to what is,
encouraging us to find 
 
a brief silence and then,
thus refreshed, go on. 
 
 
 
 
~ Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
from All the Honey
 art by Mori Yuzan
 
 
  

Saturday, May 13, 2023

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
is equivalent to the weight of every animal
on earth, including insects. Times three.
 
Six billion tons sounds impossible
until I consider how it is to swallow grief -
just a teaspoon and one may 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 Poetry of Presence II -
More Mindfulness poems
photo from NASA/JPL-Caltech/STScI/CXC/SAO
 
 
 
 
 
  

Friday, April 28, 2023

a broken open place









inside, still no moon.
but there is a broken
open place.
I am learning
to sing from there.


.
 Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer