Vox Populi
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Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: Talking with My Daughter about Grief
We lie in the dark
and speak about anything
but what I ache to speak about.
Some part of me longs
to find the words like searchlights
that will help us find
what we don’t yet know
we are looking for.
Or a black light
that might help us see
what is valuable right here,
but invisible to our ordinary eyes.
I try to infuse my words
with candlelight, but somehow
even this feels too brash,
too aggressive, and so
we lie in the dark
and I let the moon
do all the talking.
Oh waning crescent,
you know when to shine,
when to simply be held
by the dark.
~~~~
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.
Poem copyright 2024. From The Unfolding (Wildhouse, 2024).
Music by Steve Law, Art by Marisa S. White, “Storm Rider” Video by Tony Jeannette
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Gorgeous–thank you for this poem!
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Isn’t Rosemerry wonderful?
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Another beauty that illuminates the road of grief with bits of light, and with a longing for a clear way through.
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Well-said. Thank you.
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It is a wonderful poem accompanied by a wonderful reading.
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Oh, Rosemerry, how often I have been with my daughter like this – and you, of course, could put this strange intimacy and fear to intrude into the perfect words. We are still shy around each other.
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Wonderful wisdom about mothering and such verbal economy and imagery! Thank you Rosemary Wahtola Trommer and Vox!
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Oh, poet, to “let the moon / do all the talking”–how wordless we often feel in our grief. How you offer your words for all of us. Thank you, Rosemerry❤️
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Those four last lines — thank you!
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Thank you, thank you, thank you, Rosemerry. The most difficult thing I ever did was to call son John and tell him his mother had died. Seven years later, through grief in all its phases and disguises, it’s the one memory that still makes me cry. And your poem has finally expressed how to write poetically about such an experience. Every word in the poem comes home.
The poem’s experience is in some ways different, but the healing in Rosemerry’s telling lets me look into my own experience, surrounded by the dark abyss, and see.
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I’m a peer counselor for male drug addicts and I’ve seen so many families go through the deaths of their sons. It doesn’t get easier no matter how many times it happens.
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This is a wonderful poem showing grief is so unremitting yet so enriching.
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Rosemerry is the angel of healing.
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