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Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: The Prayers
When I asked the world to open me,
I did not know the price.
When I wrote that two-word prayer in the sand,
I did not know loss was the key,
devastation the hinge,
trust was the dissolution
of the idea of a door.
When I asked the world to open me,
I could never have said yes to what came next.
Perhaps I imagined the waves
knew only how to carry me.
I did not imagine they would also pull me under.
When I asked the world to open me,
I had not imagined drowning
was the way to reach the shore.
The waves of sorrow dragged me down
with their tides of unthinkable loss.
The currents emptied my pockets
and stripped me of my ideas.
I was rolled and eroded
and washed up on the sand
like driftwood—softened.
I sprawled there and wept,
astonished to still be alive.
It is not easy to continue to pray this way.
Open me.
And yet it is the truest prayer I know.
The other truest prayer,
though sometimes it frightens me,
is Thank you.
Copyright 2022 Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer co-hosts the Emerging Form podcast on creative process, Secret Agents of Change (a surreptitious kindness cabal) and Soul Writer’s Circle. Her next collection, All the Honey, comes out in April, 2023.
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This entry was posted on November 27, 2022 by Vox Populi in Health and Nutrition, Most Popular, Opinion Leaders, Poetry, spirituality and tagged elegy, gratitude, grief, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, salvation, sorrow, The Prayers.Shortlink
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Open me and thank you for whatever comes. I don’t have the courage for that prayer, but can attest to its truth. There are a hundred things I could add, that’s how much your poem evokes, but I’ll quite down, your words evoke that also
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thank you, Michael–
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Beautiful, full of grace.
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Thank you.
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How you turn pain and loss into renewal and growth, as if it is a gift! As if it is some Shamanic rebirth, if you let it. My prayer is that I get to that place some day/
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Thank you, Larry–on that, I love these words from Gregory Orr: “Not to make loss beautiful, but to make loss the place where beauty starts, where the heart understands for the first time the nature of its journey.”
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“It is not easy to continue to pray this way.
Open me.”
I love this deeply elegiac and painfully beautiful poem, Rosemerry.
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Thank you dear Lisa–yeahhhhh. It is slightly terrifying to think I am not done with my opening–and yet, and yet … love to you, sister poet, xo
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The advantage of retrospection: gratitude. Thanks, Rosemerry.
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Gratitude… yes.
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Thank you, Louise–yes, retrospection is a powerful agent for gratefulness. Beautifully said.
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“The other truest prayer”
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Yes, some prayers are more true (more authentic?) than others.
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oh dear man, brother in paradox, giant hugs to you.
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Beautiful and intuitive. Thank-you Rosemerry.
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yes, beautiful and intuitive.
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Thank you, friend.
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