LEARNING TO LIE STILL by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

  

Learning to Lie Still

by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

It isn't easy.

Good, then, to have a cat

come lie in the curve of my arm

with her full weight on my weight,

her warmth against my side.

If she purrs, so much the better.

How could I rise and disrupt

her low gravelly song?

So I lie still. Awake, but not scrolling.

Not speaking. Not running to fix.

It comes to this—my great hope

for learning to lie still

is to become a cushion for a cat.

It’s a noble hope—to lie still

as a cat in the curve of my arm,

still as a pool of daylight on the sill,

still as the sun itself, holding the center

as the whole world moves around it. 

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer co-hosts Emerging Form (a podcast on creative process), Secret Agents of Change (a surreptitious kindness cabal) and Soul Writer’s Circle. Her poetry has appeared on A Prairie Home Companion, PBS News Hour, O Magazine, American Life in Poetry, on Carnegie Hall stage, and on river rocks she leaves around town. Her collection Hush won the Halcyon Prize. Naked for Tea was a finalist for the Able Muse Book Award. Rosemerry has been writing and sharing a poem a day since 2006. Find her daily poems on her blog, A Hundred Falling Veils or a curated version (with optional prompts) on her daily audio series, The Poetic Path, available on your phone with the Ritual app. She is the author of Exploring Poetry of Presence II: Prompts to deepen your writing practice, and her poetry album, Dark Praise, explores “endarkenment,” available anywhere you listen to music. Her most recent collection is All the Honey.

*For submission guidelines, click here.*