I love April, not the least because it is National Poetry month. Poetry holds a treasured place in my life. Like a friend who comes to spend the afternoon, poems renew my body, mind and spirit. At times, the text is a trusted family member urging me toward emotional growth, other times a single perfectly placed word arrests me, forcing me to stop to explore new wisdom. Like a kaleidoscope, with the slightest twist, a worthy poem bares fresh ideas and births new passions.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer was born a woman of words, made and fashioned as much a poet as a human. For years she drafted a poem a day, building an anthology teeming with the wildly beautiful and rich mysteries of life. Then in August of 2021, just before his 17^th birthday, Rosemerry’s son Finn took his life. Experiencing one of the greatest agonies a mother can, she devotedly gave her pain to pen and paper, over and over again. Grief found a natural voice in her work and as a result we mourners are blessed with a plethora of beautiful verses and valuable lessons. For healing your grieving heart I recommend you invite Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer to join your journey.



A few years ago Evermore chose Rosemerry as their poet laureate. Rosemerry describes poetry’s impact on grief on Evermore’s website:

“I believe poetry can help us meet the most difficult moments of our lives. It doesn’t make things easier. It offers no answers. It fixes nothing. But it does offer us a way to touch our grief, to connect with the lives and deaths of our loved ones, to give voice to our anguish, to find compassion for each other, to fall in love with the world that is left, to find solace in community, to express our heartache and to explore the complex landscape of our hearts.”

 https://evermore.org/our-poet-laureate-rosemerry-wahtola-trommer/

It is hard for me to select a single poem to introduce you to Rosemerry, because I appreciate so many of them. But the following is one I often use at celebrations of life, because it brings us to the heart of grief’s work.  

For the Living

June 5, 2022 by Rosemerry

He has given you his love light to carry.
           —Wendy Videlock
 
It is the work of the living
to grieve the dead.
It is our work to wake each day,
to live into the world that is.
It is our work to weep,
and it is our work to be healed.
Some part of us knows
not only the absence of our beloveds,
but also their presence,
how they continue to teach us,
how they invite us to grow.
It is our work to be softened by loss,
to be undone, destroyed, remade.
Wounded, we recoil,
and it is our work to notice how,
like crushed and trampled grass,
we spring back.
It is our work to meet death again
and again and again,
and though it aches to be open,
it is our work to be opened,
to live into the opening
until we know ourselves
as blossoms nourished from within
by the radiance of the ones
who are no longer physically here.
They have given us their love light to carry.
It is our work to be in service to that light.

I invite you to celebrate National Poetry month by exploring Rosemerry’s poems. Follow her at https://ahundredfallingveils.com/.