OH WORLD I LOVE YOU by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

For many years I resisted the way things fall apart. I made a life out of holding things together…

I believed that poetry could work as a kind of glue, could help me to fix problems, could help me to know. But then, about two years ago, the world helped things fall apart so completely that I was able, at least for a moment, to see through my longing to make things neat. I could see through my desire to control the world. 

Since then, poems have become more a way of unknowing. I come to the page with curiosity instead of answers. Rilke writes in “Autumn,” about how this experience of surrender can lead us into “seeing” god: “And yet there is Someone, whose hands, infinitely calm, holding up all this falling.” This poem is about my ongoing practice of allowing the world to be as it is without trying to reshape or recreate it.

 Oh World I Love You

Oh world, I love you,

you with your roots

that thrust up through pavement,

you with your mudflows

and rockfalls and storms.

See how daily you feed

and destroy me. How

gorgeous your fruits,

how merciless your gravity.

I love you, world, how

you make me and fuel me

and undo me again and again. Always

another death to die

and always a new bloom.

Never the same, always

the same. World, it feels

too proud to say I am you,

you with your splendor,

you with your grace.

I am dust and ashes.

You move me, adventure me.

World, thy will be done.

My problems are not problems.

My laws all are nonsense.

My rules, my dreams are cages.

Sometimes I forget to let you

raze me. I try to wrestle

the club from your hands.

And when the destruction

is done, I try to rebuild the walls,

not seeing you were offering me

infinity. Sometimes you first bring me milk,

then tear me down tenderly,

your hands the hands of a lover

undressing me slowly, but not

stopping with the scarf, the skirt—

taking also every idea I have,

every certainty, every word,

everything I would say is mine.

World I am rambling through

the silence you hold for me.

I am like a woman dying of thirst

who splashes the water with eager hands

instead of cupping it, raising it to her parched lips.

Oh world, I am losing my mind

and laughing about it. All language

is dust, and look, you blow it away.

Still I am talking to you, crazy,

I love you, I love you. Come wind,

catch these words, rend them

from the one who thinks

she is speaking. Let them fall

all around her like leaves.  

Poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer “is a chanteuse of the heart,” says poet Art Goodtimes. She served two terms as the first poet laureate for San Miguel County, Colorado, where she still leads monthly poetry readings, teaches in schools, leads writing workshops and leaves poems written on rocks around the town. Her most recent collection, The Less I Hold, comes out of her poem-a-day practice, which she has been doing for over seven years. Her work has also appeared on A Prairie Home Companion and in O Magazine, on tie-dyed scarves, alleyway fences and in her children’s lunchboxes. Favorite one-word mantra: adjust. Visit her website here for ideas about writing, and to read her daily poems click here. 

~If you are interested in seeing your poetry appear in this blog, or submitting a poem by a woman that has inspired you, please click here for submission guidelines. I greatly look forward to hearing from you!~