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.
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thank you for this moments respite.... could feel your words... :)
ReplyDeleteThank you, Maureen--
DeleteBeautiful. I love your work, Rosemerry!
ReplyDeleteThank you!!
Delete