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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 CompanionPBS News Hour, O MagazineAmerican 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 Pathavailable on your phone with the Ritual app. She is the author of Exploring Poetry of Presence II: Prompts to deepen your writing practiceand her poetry album, Dark Praise, explores “endarkenment,” available anywhere you listen to music. Her most recent collection is All the Honey.


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Comments

  1. thank you for this moments respite.... could feel your words... :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Beautiful. I love your work, Rosemerry!

    ReplyDelete

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