Tag: Wonder

Four Poems by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

~ ONE ART ~ 7 Comments

On the Street in Lancaster, Ohio

I like your costume,
the woman said, and I said,
Thank you. Thing was,
I wasn’t wearing a costume.
I was dressed as me,
a middle-aged woman
in tall black boots,
black yoga pants,
a long gray sweater
and my dad’s gray hat.

It wasn’t till after she left
I laughed, delighted
to be called out
for dressing up as myself,
a person I’ve been
trying to be my whole life.

And where, I wondered,
does the costume end?
Does it include my hair?
My skin? My name?
My stories? My resume?
My voice? All of it,
a costume of self
worn by whatever
is most alive inside.

I’m thinking this human frame
is just some get-up the infinite
has slipped into for a time,
even as it slips into other
costumes, including one
that looks exactly like you.
And hey, I like your costume.

*

Fact Checking

When a gator is chasing you,
he said, you run away,
but zig zag. They can scent you,
and they’re fast, but they aren’t
agile enough to turn well. And
this is how I might have become
a gator bite. His advice sounded good,
and it was echoed by others I met,
but fact is, the best bet to survive
a gator attack is to back up slow
with the hands in the air to look big.
If it charges, then run. Fast.
In a straight line. No zagging.
They’re quick, but tire easily on land.
How many other stories do I trust
every day, not thinking to look them up?
How many people have I fed to the gators?
The world has never been swampier.
The need to check what we’re told is great.
Look friend, here comes a gator even now.
Face him. Raise your arms. Back away slow.
Don’t turn your back if you can help it.
They look more like people than you’d think.

*

Today’s Headline

And then one day, while I read
aloud to my husband the news
and felt the widening hole in my heart,
he raised his hand to quiet me.
I followed his gaze out the window
to see in the yard a small fluffy thing
with black and white eyespots on its head.
A northern pygmy owl beside our door,
stout body slightly smaller than my fist.
It turned its neck a full half circle
to look at me with bright yellow eyes.
In an instant, I shifted from disgust
with the world to awe. Awe for this
fierce bespeckled miracle, this wonder
of feather and beak and claw, this
small being in the grass looking back
at me as if to say, Here is also the news.
How surprising the world can be.
How quickly, when I let it, amazement
overwrites my fear and makes
of the hole in my heart a home.

*

When They Asked Me, “What Is Your Current Hyperfixation”

I could have said potato chips. Always true. Plain ones. No flavors. Potato. Oil. Salt. I could have said black licorice from Finland, also always true. Or long flowy pants with no front pockets. That’s new. Tending my eight aloe babies still recovering from their transplant. Counting orchid buds about to bloom. How many grams of protein in a serving of anything. The insane softness of my daughter’s inner arm. How baby swifts can fly ten months without stopping. Imagining Rodin and Rilke watching sunsets together. But I said the only words I could—I am starved for all stories of kindness. The young man delivering diapers to immigrant families in Maine. The woman sending socks to my friend with cancer. The stranger who walked a labyrinth with me. My husband offering me the last egg in the carton. Anyone who smiles and says hello in the grocery store aisles. Anyone who says hello back.

*

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer is a poet, teacher, speaker and writing facilitator who co-hosts Emerging Form, a podcast on creative process. Her daily audio series, The Poetic Path, is on the Ritual app. Her poems have appeared on A Prairie Home Companion, PBS News Hour, O Magazine, Washington Post’s Book Club, and Carnegie Hall stage. Her recent collections are All the Honey and The Unfolding. In 2024, she became poet laureate for Evermore, helping others explore grief and love through poetry. Since 2006, she’s written a poem a day, sharing them on her blog, A Hundred Falling Veils. One-word mantra: Adjust.

5 Poems by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

~ ONE ART ~ 12 Comments

Allium

While I did not fix
the thing I most
wish to fix, and I
did not do
the most important
thing on my list,
and I did not save
anyone, and I did
not solve the world’s
problems, I did
plant the onion sets
in the garden,
pressed my fingers
into the dry earth,
knew myself as
a thin dry start.
Oh patience, good
self. This slow
and quiet growing,
this, too, is
what you are
here to do.

*

Turning to Physics

An electrical current
knows nothing of the path
it will take. It follows all paths,
but flows best toward
where it flows best.

It sounds so simple,
and yet the electrons of this body,
charged with my beliefs,
defy nature and rush toward resistance.

How often I try to fight myself.
How often I battle my own current,
the current of the world—
it’s like wading through honey instead of water,
this thinking I know best.

Sometimes, I see how my own resistance
is nothing but a part of the path.
In that moment, I flow toward where I flow best.
In that moment I am copper, ductile, tough,
In that moment, I am so alive with it, the buzz.

*

Wonder

I wear my wonder
like old running shoes—
not elegant,
not sophisticated,
surprisingly inappropriate
in certain rooms.
I notice how others
sometimes wrinkle their noses
at a blatant sporting of wonder,
thinking, perhaps, I must be oblivious
to the dress code:
stilettos of apathy,
high heels of indifference,
boots of cool reserve.
But dang, this wonder
gets me where I need to go
every inch,
every mile, even
across the room.
When everywhere I step
is broken glass,
wearing this wonder
is the only reason
I can move at all.

*

Belonging

Forgive me, please, when I,
thrilling in how much I love you,
believe you belong to me—
like a book or shirt or a ring.

Writing that short list,
it now seems strange
I believe I own anything.
I know well the unstitching of loss.

Let me learn to love you loosely
the way I love morning,
the way I love song,
the way I love hawks on the wing.

Let me love you the way
I love poems, startled
and grateful each time I find
it is I who belongs to them.

*

After the Tortoise Won the Race

It was the strangest thing.
She’d never cared before about winning.
Life had been about basking in the sun
at the entrance to her burrow.
Sometimes when she was warm enough,
she’d plod off in search of leaves.

Now, she thought about finish lines.
The feel of the ribbon on her prehistoric nose.
The roar of the crowd as she crossed.
They say tortoises don’t have feelings,
no hippocampus in their small brains,
but she’d felt it, the tug of success.

She spent decades looking for another race
she had a chance to win. None of her friends
could understand. Come dig in the sandy soil,
they said, but it wasn’t enough anymore.
She wished she’d never said yes to that race.
She wished she could race the hare again tonight.

She wished she could stop defining her life
by that one moment. Wished she could stop wishing
for any life beyond the life she had now,
sleeping in her burrow, cool and moist.
Wished all she wanted were soft weeds and long-leaf pines.
Wished she could hear that crowd. Just one more time.

*

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer co-hosts Emerging Form, a podcast on creative process. She also co-hosts Telluride’s Talking Gourds Poetry Club and is co-founder of Secret Agents of Change. She teaches poetry for mindfulness retreats, women’s retreats, scientists, hospice and more. Her poetry has appeared in O Magazine, on A Prairie Home Companion, in Rattle.com and in Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry. Her most recent collection, Hush, won the Halcyon Prize. She is often found in the kitchen baking with her teenage children. One word mantra: Adjust. https://wordwoman.com/