Vox Populi
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Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: Acceptance
Today grief is a long steady rain
and the thing to do is to walk
in the long and steady of it.
The thing is to let the face
get wet, let the clothes get wet,
let the hair get wet and plastered
against the cheeks, the neck.
The thing is to meet the soaking world
and the soaking skin and the soaking
shoes and the soaking dreams
and not pretend it’s dry.
Whatever longing there is for dryness,
it is soaking too. Because it’s raining,
the thing to do is to walk in the long
and steady rain, to walk in the sodden,
soaking world, to trust that it will
not rain forever, to breathe in the scent
of the wet, wet earth, to kiss the rain,
to be kissed by the rain.
To be wet in the wet, wet world.
~~~
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer is a poet, teacher, speaker and writing facilitator who co-hosts the Emerging Form 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, American Life in Poetry, and Carnegie Hall stage. Her most recent poetry collections are All the Honey and The Unfolding.
Copyright 2024. From The Unfolding (Wildhouse, 2024).
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Yes, solace. So lovely and true. ❤️
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I shared this wonderful poem to my FB page for others to enjoy too.
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A poem about healing. We all need this poem.
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Much better than curling on the couch with it. No rain.
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Keep that right brain going, you, whether on the couch or in the rain.
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Every day is a day to read a Rosemerry poem. ❤️❤️❤️❤️
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Agreed!
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ditto!
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Rosemerry really is great, isn’t she?
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How I felt every line, and love this poem. I copied, in my journal, and in capital letters:
“the thing to do is to walk
in the long and steady of it.”
and how that “it” can be so much, for so many. So many different sorrows, but love, too. And I, too, love the poem’s title. Acceptance is “IT”, isn’t it?
(I so love your poems, Rosemerry!)
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As someone who has grieved deeply, there were times of steady rain, but for me always the bolts of lightning, often random, and overwhelming. The thunder still rumbles years later. I walked in steady rain, sure, but the triggers to despair or anxiety were always there. Grief could storm and rage, it could simmer like a pot on the stove, needing to be watched.
all that said, I felt as I read Acceptance several times, how the poem works as incantation, built in a good way to make its message readable and communal in its repetitions of all the water, rain, soaking imagery. But it left me with a pit in my stomach. It reminded me that a poem can be both a healing ritual but also a funeral dirge at the same time. It did arouse much in me, and perhaps for each griever, something different. and the collective grief of hurricane survivors, some who are in dire straits as we read this.
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What a perceptive and wise elucidation, Jim. Thank you!
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Rosemerry’s poetry is so of the earth and the sky. So real. I find genuine solace in her work.
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I do too. Her poetry heals us…
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Solace is a great word for Rosemerry’s poem. For me the word grief is a trigger to all sorts of things. I’m glad she titled the poem Acceptance. It’s the keystone word for the griever. And to let the face get wet, as she writes, is a wonderful, powerful image of healing: facing what is real with the tears of soothing rain. sigh.
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