Category Archives: poetry

Fall color

How the petunias hold onto their color in this year of your death! Improbable color, vitality a surprise in the time of frost and the coming dark.

I look at them in mild wonder, a shallow but palpable appreciation in the season of firsts.

The day after tomorrow? Our first anniversary without you since you were born. Our first anniversary since you died.

We will get take out and stare at a screen and try not to notice how impossible it feels to continue without you.

The yellow maple leaves drift down and land with a soft crinkling sound onto the deck. You can’t see or hear leaves falling anymore, not here, not anywhere.

Each leaf falling signals its place in the natural order. There is nothing natural about your absence. No order or sense in it.

Very soon it will be full dark and another day without you will come to a close.

Seven months, a quilt, and a poem

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We lost Danny seven months ago today.

This is one of the quilts I was working on as I sat in the rental space in Colorado, where every time Danny drove off, I’d wonder if I’d ever see him again. I couldn’t look at the cloth for months. Somehow, now I can. The dirty and chaotic feel of it captures some of the awfulness of those days in Longmont.

Deb thought I should rethink the green moon so I covered it with some organza. What do you think? An improvement is my feeling.

Here’s a poem by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer. I get one every day now by email.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

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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

Walking at six months

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A poem written on the six-month anniversary of Danny’s death (9/16/26). Digital collage from ages ago using a photo of a boy from Skateboarding Magazine.

Walking

I saw a hawk. Eye level. Flew like a shot across my path.

I’d just been thinking: some people cannot stay, they just cannot stay.

A few houses later, the elegant thing sailed overhead, wings outstretched, riding the thermal currents. Its under-feathers caught the morning light as if to say:

I, raptor, am sacred. You, human, are sacred. And that child who you lost? He too is sacred, still.

And this day? Holy. Holy. Holy.