What the Day Gives

Suddenly, sun. Over my shoulder

in the middle of gray November

what I hoped to do comes back,

asking.

Across the street the fiery trees

hold onto their leaves,

red and gold in the final months

of this unfinished year,

they offer blazing riddles.

In the frozen fields of my life

there are no shortcuts to spring,

but stories of great birds in migration

carrying small ones on their backs,

predators flying next to warblers

they would, in a different season, eat.

Stunned by the astonishing mix in this uneasy world

that plunges in a single day from despair

to hope and back again, I commend my life

to Ruskin’s difficult duty of delight,

and to that most beautiful form of courage,

to be happy.

-- Jeanne Lohmann

Nothing Wants to Suffer

after Linda Hogan

Nothing wants to suffer. Not the wind

as it scrapes itself against the cliff. Not the cliff

being eaten, slowly, by the sea. The earth does not want

to suffer the rough tread of those who do not notice it.

The trees do not want to suffer the axe, nor see

their sisters felled by root rot, mildew, rust.

The coyote in its den. The puma stalking its prey.

These, too, want ease and a tender animal in the mouth

to take their hunger. An offering, one hopes,

made quickly, and without much suffering.

The chair mourns an angry sitter. The lamp, a scalded moth.

A table, the weight of years of argument.

We know this, though we forget.

Not the shark nor the tiger, fanged as they are.

Nor the worm, content in its windowless world

of soil and stone. Not the stone, resting in its riverbed.

The riverbed, gazing up at the stars.

Least of all, the stars, ensconced in their canopy,

looking down at all of us— their offspring—

scattered so far beyond reach.

-- Danusha Lameris

“The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.” 

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” 

The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1951), p. 474

Consecration

Even a song can be an altar,

a place to bring an offering—

as on this anxious day

when I can’t stop giving my heart

to love songs for the broken world.  

And perhaps the breath, too, is an altar

on which the song is placed,

which would mean what is sacred

might be ever flowing through us,

a space where we might meet the divine,

which is exactly what I believe.  

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Neighbors in October

All afternoon his tractor pulls a flat wagon

with bales to the barn, then back to the waiting

chopped field. It trails a feather of smoke.

Down the block we bend with the season:

shoes to polish for a big game,

storm windows to batten or patch.

And how like a field is the whole sky now

that the maples have shed their leaves, too.

It makes us believers—stationed in groups,

leaning on rakes, looking into space. We rub blisters

over billows of leaf smoke. Or stand alone,

bagging gold for the cold days to come.

-- David Baker

From The Truth About Small Towns.

The Clearing

At the center of every fear

is a clearing, and though you must

trudge for miles in the dark woods

to get there, it’s worth the trip:

now you can sit down for a while

among grass and hawkweed, you can

bask in unfiltered light, and see

the heavy clouds shifting overhead.

At the center of every fear,

if felt completely, is an empty

space where the wind tickles

the hairs on your neck, then arcs

an arm around your shoulder,

pulling you closer like a father

at last unafraid to show affection,

here to let you know you’re not alone.

—James Crews

If you know your Creation story,

Then you know from where you have come

And you know where you are going

And what you were meant to become

You'll know how to love your partner

How to raise your babies to be women and men

who'll meet the purpose of their creation

And you can live your life so, too, you can.

If you know who you are, 

and what you must do

Then you’ll know what to say 

When your time is through,

When asked by the ones who have gone before, 

“Did you always love all of the people,

though they may never have loved you back?”

“Did you lift up the ones who had fallen?”

"Did you stand in the way of attack?"

“Did you help those to walk who had stumbled?”

"Did you help them to straighten their back?"

“Did you listen to stories they needed to tell?

...never judging their wrong from their right?“

"Did you make sure they knew you believed them?"

"And to see beyond darkness, some light?"

"Did you share with all those who had nothing?”

“Did you comfort those crying inside?”

“Did you listen to those who were angry?”

“Did you take away pain they were trying to hide?”

“Did you take care of all of Creation?”

“Did you keep it a beautiful place?”

“Did you love all the things that were put here?”

“On the earth, in the sky, and the water that flowed and helped nourish this place?

“Did you hold true to all of your teachings?”

“Were you the best Anishinaabe you could be?” 

"Step forward and tell us your answers

....the Ancestors are anxious to hear and to see.”

                       Mizanagiizhik

--Murray Sinclair

Hope Waits Inside

The day dawned as it always does,

milky light nuzzling the drapes

then leaking through the cracks like love

in a time of grief. I want to meet

this moment with arms swung wide open,

a gate that welcomes everything—

but dread rusts the hinges, and fear keeps

the latch from popping free. As usual,

I’m called to see hope where it seems

there is none, just as I must trust that

inside rain-slick, stripped-bare branches

wait the buds of new leaves, ready to

burst forth, like a happiness that doesn’t

depend on what happens.

—James Crews

Inviting Spaciousness

Today when the heart is a small, tight knot,

I do not try to untangle it. I don’t tug on the strings

in a desperate attempt to unravel it.

I don’t even wonder at how it got so snarled.

Instead, I imagine cradling it, cupping it

with my hands like something precious,

something wounded, a bird with a broken wing.

I cradle my heart like the frightened thing it is.

I imagine all the other frightened hearts

and imagine them all being held in love.

And I breathe. I breathe and feel

how the breathing invites a spaciousness.

I breathe and let myself be moved by the breathing

as I open and soften. Open and soften.

And nothing changes. And everything changes.

The heart, still a knot, remembers

it knows how to love. It knows it is not alone.

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing

Now all the truth is out,

Be secret and take defeat

From any brazen throat,

For how can you compete,

Being honor bred, with one

Who were it proved he lies

Were neither shamed in his own

Nor in his neighbors' eyes;

Bred to a harder thing

Than Triumph, turn away

And like a laughing string

Whereon mad fingers play

Amid a place of stone,

Be secret and exult,

Because of all things known

That is most difficult.

-W.B. Yeats

When people say,

"we have made it

through worse before"

all I hear is the wind slapping against the gravestones

of those who did not make it, those who did not

survive to see the confetti fall from the sky, those who

did not live to watch the parade roll down the street.

I have grown accustomed to a lifetime of aphorisms

meant to assuage my fears, pithy sayings meant to

convey that everything ends up fine in the end. There is no

solace in rearranging language to make a different word

tell the same lie. Sometimes the moral arc of the universe

does not bend in a direction that will comfort us.

Sometimes it bends in ways we don't expect & there are

people who fall off in the process. Please, dear reader,

do not say I am hopeless, I believe there is a better future

to fight for, I simply accept the possibility that I may not

live to see it. I have grown weary of telling myself lies

that I might one day begin to believe. We are not all left

standing after the war has ended. Some of us have

become ghosts by the time the dust has settled.

- Clint Smith

Lumbricus terrestris (The Earthworm)

On a day when the world is weighty,

dark and dense with need,

I want to be the earthworm

that gives itself over to tunneling,

its every movement an act

of bringing spaciousness.

And when minutes feel crushed by urgency,

I want to meet the world wormlike,

which is to say grounded,

consistent, even slow.

No matter how desperate the situation,

the worm does not tunnel faster

nor burrow more.

It knows it can take decades

to build fine soil.

To whatever is compacted,

the worm offers its good worm work,

quietly bringing porosity

to what is trodden, compressed.

So often, in my rush to repair,

I end up exhausted.

Let my gift to the world be

my constancy, a devotion to openness,

my willingness to be with what is.

Let my gift to myself be patience

as I tend what is dense and dark.

-- Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, from THE UNFOLDING (Wildhouse Poetry, 2024)

Love Letter Sent Back in Time to Myself Three Years Ago

Your worst fears will happen,

will happen soon. And you

will crumple. Will wail.

Will not know how to say hello.

Will somehow remember

how to stand. How to open

a door. How to sit on a chair

and listen to the swallows,

the relentlessly sweet chickadees.

You will have no words, but you will have

your attention, your willingness,

your stubbornness, your

devotion to life.

Your heart, though wrecked,

will not be erased. It will beat,

will beat on, will beat on.

And though I do not understand

how this happens, you live.

You not only live, you’re remade,

just as rivers are remade by rain,

just as wind is refashioned

by the cool of the night. Just as

bones become stronger

after the break. Just as

a story resists The End.

Just as the notes of a song

can be reused to compose

a new song. Oh sweetheart,

you will not only sing

the new song—a song

equal parts haunting and beautiful—

you will be the new song

and the silence that holds it.

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Only Love

Only love is big enough to hold all the pain of this world.

-Sharon Salzberg

And so I imagine the entire earth

as one beating heart held in the space

of this universe, inside a larger body

we can't fathom, filling with enough

love to lead each of us out of the cave

of our personal pain and into the light-

enough love to lead all humans as one

out of collective fear, rage, and hate

into a place of peace that is found only

within our own hearts, beating in sync

with the pulse of this planet we were

born to inhabit, despite the daily storms

which overtake us and make us forget

we are the lifeblood pumped into these

veins, every particle of love we generate

running into rivers, lakes, and creeks,

evaporating into the air we breathe,

give back, and breathe again.

--James Crews