Vox Populi
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Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: The Grand Quilt
I don’t believe we can stitch together
only scraps of beauty, squares of light.
I don’t believe in a quilt that doesn’t also
have patches of sorrow, blocks of ache.
Such pieces are, of course, much harder
to want to stitch in. But it matters
that we do not exclude them.
It matters that we don’t pretend
they do not exist.
It matters that we sew every piece
into the grand cloth.
Now I know it matters
how we sew these pieces in,
perhaps using our finest silk thread,
perhaps with an elaborate stitch
our grandmother taught us,
or perhaps we must use
a stitch we make up
because no one ever taught us
how to do this most difficult task—
to meet what at first seems unwanted
and to incorporate it into the whole
knowing everything depends on this.
Copyright 2024 Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer is a poet, teacher and storyteller. Her many books and recordings include All the Honey (Samara Press, 2023). She lives with her husband and daughter in Placerville, Colorado, on the banks of the wild and undammed San Miguel River.
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You have expressed an important truth about life once again, Rosemerry. I remember my maternal grandmother used to take old socks and tie them into a rug. They were always beautiful.
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Lovely image, Jimmy. Thank you!
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all these ways of honoring the humble, finding connections, creating beauty of the unexpected 😉
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You have expressed an important truth about life once again, Rosemerry. I remember my maternal grandmother used to take old socks and tie them into a rug. They were always beautiful.
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This reminds me of an image from a Judson Mitcham poem which I’ll have to find. Just beautiful, Rosemerry❤️
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Hey beautiful poet, thank you 😍
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This poem is a quilt of emotions and imagery — so deftly sewn together. Bravo.
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Yes it is!
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Thank you, Laure Anne … oh friend I’ve never met, I appreciate you and your poems so much
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Never learned to quilt, but the patches of my life fit all the requirements: happy, sad, frustration, disappointment. My dear friend who moved to Missouri sent me a quilt that echoed my life, the kids and dogs, sunflowers, comfort amidst stroke, and plague, cancer and now heart from cancer’s cure. For Mother’s Day my son gave me a photo book of our trip to Colombia, comforting patchwork remembrance.
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Lovely response, Barbara. Thank you.
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What a special gift–oh the patchwork, the all of it.
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wonderful poem Rosemary! I had a grandmother that did crewel embroidery on squares she fashioned into rugs for each of her grandchildren (and there were many of us!). She let me draw a design for the one she made for me, as I’m also an artist. She believed people needed and should always have (aside from the normal course of their days), “things they could do with their hands.”
The “Caswell Carpet” at the Met was her “mountaintop” of aspiration in that medium as she’d visited it many times throughout her life.
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Thanks, Sean. I always enjoy your enthusiastic comments about VP poems.
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How very special! Thanks, Sean, for sharing this … what a gift she gave you!
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