A Holiday Poem for Telluride

23 Dec A Holiday Poem for Telluride

Trimming

by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart. And try to love the questions themselves. Do not seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions.

-Rainier Maria Rilke

The ladder was tilted alarmingly
and I stood on the very top step
with a long pole in my hand
and a new strand of white LED lights.
And the Austrian pines were tall.
Very, very tall. And there was no
thought then in my mind about
everything we are and everything
we are not and everything we might
become. There were no desires nor
fears nor long range plans. Nothing
except my determination to loop
the green wire on the highest branch
and corkscrew it gradually toward the ground.
I know … I know what? That it is
hard sometimes to live with the questions.
To not want answers. To not try to fix
myself or the world. But for forty minutes,
is it shameful to say this? I reveled
in making things just so—a coil of light
that perfectly twined through evergreen boughs,
answering the oncoming darkness
with perfect, brilliant, spiraling white.

(ed. note: See Rosemerry's poetry blog, http://ryezome.wordpress.com/, for a beautiful daily fix)