Guests to WholeHeart’s recent Poetry As Portal event featuring Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer were treated to a meditative ebb and flow of inspiring conversation shared between she and Holly Wilkinson, WH executive director.
Sixty participants gathered on Zoom, the eve of June 3rd, to hear Rosemerry read some of her recent poetic creations aloud, but also to invite listeners to use her poetry as listening passageways into their own lives and experiences.
“I love that you call writing poetry a companion, and not just a practice,” said Rosemerry responding to Holly. “The poems and paying attention do have a presence to them.”
Rosemerry joined Holly in affirming that a daily writing practice is really a daily listening practice of “finding our ears, being increasingly attentive, curious and full of wonder.”
The Colorado-based poet has been writing a poem a day and sharing them with others for nearly two decades. The exercise began as a 30-day experiment with two other people; they eventually concluded the practice, but Rosemerry loved the accountability and never stopped composing a poem a day. Today, her listserv reaches 7,000 in-boxes daily.
Over time two things have happened, she said, including an ability to be more intimate and honest in her writing.
“When I started 18 years ago. I don’t think I was that interested in the truth,” she recalled. “That’s laughable to me now. My own willingness to be true with myself has changed radically since I began this practice. My devotion to what’s true is so different now, and that requires vulnerability; and vulnerability creates intimacy.”
Writing poetry as a listening practice has undergirded Rosemerry through some of the most challenging chapters of her life. It’s been almost two years since her 17-year-old son Finn took his own life, and she said, “there isn’t a poem that doesn’t have that loss inside of it.”
“I am listening and being attentive to the sound of his absence,” she shared. “What is it like for you to not be here? And what is it like now? That experience changes all the time. How different it is from second to second. Now there’s a moment of elation, then despair, now there’s this longing, now peace…I want to listen into his absence the way I lean into the night.”
An enormous outpouring of love and support from hundreds in her writing community undergirded her amid such incomprehensible loss.
“I felt it in such an embodied, physical way,” Rosemerry said, “this surge of support and love, like a tsunami that was way too much. I even tried to resist it. I could feel it coming, and it obliterated my ‘no.’ I don’t know how anyone makes it through a tragedy like this without that kind of support.”
“I WANT TO LISTEN TO YOUR ABSENCE
I want to listen to your absence
the way I listen to the night—
the way the dark somehow
invites a deeper listening.
I want to hear, for instance,
the way silence fills in
where your voice has been,
or the way the room seems to know itself
by the pound of missing footsteps,
and in this way, I find you
where I cannot find you.
I am thinking of how the night opens up
between the calls of the owl
and how I listen in that interval
not only with my ears, but with my skin.
I want to listen for you with my lungs—
as if every breath is attentive
to the syllables of grief, of love.
I want my heart to angle in
to hear what the silence has to say.
I don’t want to hear what I most want to hear—
I want to hear what is really here.
I want to listen and learn from the listening.
I want to hear what is true.
I want to listen into your absence
and lean into it the way I lean into the night—
something so much larger than me,
something familiar and always new,
something so present, yet unable to be touched.
Something I am still learning to love.
-from All the Honey (Samara Press, 2023)”
Rosemerry is a firm believer in letting a poem lead the writer and not knowing where a poem is going to end up. This is the case in a poem she read aloud about the vastness of a neutron star fitting into the tangible object of a kitchen spoon (just below).
“I challenged myself to write about a ‘neutron star’ and ‘tenderness,’” she said, “and I wanted to see what these two things wanted to say to each other.”
Holly picked up on this sentiment, saying: “kind of like letting the poem know more than we do, an invitation to epiphany every time, or to discover that there is nothing here.”
“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.
-from All the Honey (Samara Press, 2023)”
In response to Holly’s query about “what is reminding you lately that you belong,” Rosemerry responded unequivocally, “any silence filled with the sound of the San Miquel River,” a roiling river that’s visible just outside her door.
“This is what it is to flow in the world,” Rosemerry said. “This is with me when I sleep, when I wake. It’s with me now. I belong to that.”
“It’s alive and doesn’t have one sound or cadence,” Holly added, “but keeps on changing.”
Event participants then used one of Rosemerry’s poems entitled, The Question, as a portal for their own listening practice during the evening. Reverberating throughout the poem was the primary question, Is this the path of love?
We include the reflection prompts below, inviting your own listening practice and musings.
“THE QUESTION
for Jude Jordan Kalush, who asked the question
All day, I replay these words:
Is this the path of love?
I think of them as I rise,
as I wake my children,
as I wash dishes,
as I drive too close
behind the slow blue Subaru,
Is this the path of love?
Think of these words as I stand in line
at the grocery store,
think of them as I sit on the couch
with my daughter.
Amazing how quickly six words
become compass, the new lens
through which to see myself in the world.
I notice what the question is not.
Not, “Is this right?”
Not, “Is this wrong?”
It just longs to know
how the action of existence
links us to the path to love.
And is it this? Is it this?
All day, I let myself be led by the question.
All day I let myself not be too certain
of the answer. Is it this?
Is this the path of love? I ask
as I wait for the next word to come.
-from All the Honey (Samara Press, 2023)”
3 Reflection Prompts
What does this poem open in you?
Where in your life could a little question of love be welcome these days?
What is the next word to come when you wonder: Is this the path of love?