Vox Populi
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Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: Wilding
It is always near-freezing,
this high alpine lake where
we slide into oddly blue water,
and bare strangled sounds
tear from our throats
as if our own wildness
is shredding through
manicured versions of self.
I crave it, this scraping away
of everything that isn’t
limb-thrash and lung-gasp
and skin-scream and heart-bang
and wild uncontrollable breathing,
crave the tingling after,
the feral laughter, the way
the world slips more deeply into us
when we dare to slip
more deeply into the 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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Love Rosemerry’s poetry. Always so fulfilling.
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I agree, Mandy.
>
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Scraping away of the coatings of artifice to get to the feral laughter. Yes.
I once plunged into a snowdrift at the peak of a Colorado mountain on a hot Fourth of July day. It seemed a perfect moment: Wonder-full, forty years gone, but still vivid, feral.
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still feral–oh so essential to our humanness to strip away that artifice …
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my little backyard is filled with ferality, though still in the Anthropocene. The boundaries we face. Thanks for the poem.
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…and in aquatic company with Sean & Jan & Rosemary, you brought me back to the first time — at 18 and free at last, at last, from a nunnery where I grew up — I ran, early Spring, into the hard gray waves of the North Sea and, like you in your lake, I was breathless and wildly rocked, & alive & happy!
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breathless and wildly rocked and alive and happy!!! yeah … no way to be anywhere else but there!
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Once upon a time in May in Finland.
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Yes! I have done many cold cold plunges in Finland, too! Even once in April through a hole in the ice of the bay! I love that we are both Finnish dippers!
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Yay! Eläköön Suomi!!!
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You’ve brought back memories of the icy blast of jumping into the spring fed pool of my youth. No matter how hot the day, the plunge always drew screams and shouts. Wonderful, Rosemerry. I’m right there with you.
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such full body memories!!
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Oh yes what a fine message: to remind us to seek that intimacy the worlds of humankind are ever taking us from. I’d forgotten in the instance of your poem that so much has gone awry, and I am grateful to be restored to what’s real in that moment.
Monday has come again. We’re planting ryegrass all day, ahead of rain (we pray), my son and I. So, it won’t be difficult to stay where, Rosemerry, you’ve put me, with your poem.
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Yes, the intimacy, that is it. Joy to you in the ryegrass planting ❤️
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