I’ve signed up to get her daily poems. It’s a treat every morning to open up my email and read her words. This was from this morning (recall that she lost her son, Finn, to suicide some years back).
Dear Heart,
I remember those months
when you were naked,
when the pain was so great
and you were so tender
not even the flimsiest
slip of protection would stay on.
This was how I learned
your true state—
raw, porous, vulnerable—
the only place in which love grows.
How did I ever think
I could protect you from pain?
Why did I ever believe
that that was the goal?
As if breaking is not inevitable.
As if loving doesn’t
always involve a flood,
a drought, a drowning,
a dearth, a blessing.
Now, no matter how many
layers I try to wrap you in—
there is no not knowing
that your emptiest, loneliest,
places are also worthy
of love.
Now, I have learned to be grateful
that even when I wrap you
in an armor of busy-ness
or coats of competency,
you are always naked underneath.
—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Beautiful. I never heard of this poet, will look for her work!
My sister-in-law gave me some Mary Oliver greats for my birthday. I’m just getting to them now and gosh… so many I haven’t read or even read twice.
Are you outta the way of the n’easter?
oops maybe not “her”, I’m so bad at gender sensitivity. at least I’m saying oops?
She goes by she.
Two friends gave me volumes of her poems after Danny died. She’s in Colorado and knows suicide-grief. She found her son and has a poem about the color of his blood on her hands. She was an accomplished poet before he died and has a new book coming out.
We will likely get some rain, maybe enough to have a little water in the basement so today we’ll spend some time getting stuff off the floor down there. We just had tree work done at the beginning of the month, so we should be okay with wind.
Fortunately for you, it’s now headed to the Cape and the Islands. A few days ago there was still some chance of it hitting the Jersey shore.
Dee I came across this the other day and thought about you.. decided today was a good day to share it .. it spoke truth to me also never heard of the term Grief Brain which also spoke to me.
Poetry Is Great for Grief Brain
There’s also science behind why poetry can be healing. When we’re grieving, our prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain that makes rational decisions) is often overloaded or offline. Poetry—through metaphor, emotion, and memory—activates brain regions that bypass logic and go straight to feeling. fMRI studies confirm that poetry lights up the brain like music or a meaningful conversation.
This may be why so many grieving people find poetry helpful: it allows them to feel when they can’t yet think.
In other words, poetry allows us to feel our way through grief when thinking doesn’t work.
And because poems are often short, they meet us where our attention span exists during grief—in short bits and pieces. Unlike novels and nonfiction books, books of poetry are easy to pick up and put down when you can’t focus for very long.
So great to learn about and of course I already know this in my bones (I cannot read novels right now, for instance), it is nevertheless helpful to see it spelled out. Thanks for sharing.
Tina~ thank you for sharing this simple, yet profound idea. I will remember this, for it feels so true.
so much truth held in these words, the poem and the comments….our non-thinking bodies hold and move us, no matter what
thanks to all for your sharing
“Non-thinking bodies” strikes me as a way to describe your original and viscerally-striking ink figures.