(#1) POETS’ CORNER: ROSEMERRY FOR FATHER’S DAY

13 Jun (#1) POETS’ CORNER: ROSEMERRY FOR FATHER’S DAY

Editor note: With this poem by our favorite Wordwoman, Telluride Inside… and Out launches its celebration of Fathers’ Day, with five poems by three of our very favorite writers: Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, Kierstin Bridger and David Feela, all regular contributors, each blessed with the magical gift of spinning holiday treacle into gold. As we post their wonderful tribute poems, I hold their word treasures to my heart. I lost my father on Mothers’ Day, a cruel sleight of Nature, since in my family, we never celebrated Hallmark holidays. Love and respect, my dad taught us girls, should not, could not, be turned on or off  like a light switch according to a date on a calendar. Rosemerry’s first poem pays tribute to her father-in-law, who also passed away and sounds like a man worth knowing. Or trying to know…. The form of the poem, she explained in a note to us, is a villanelle, which Dylan Thomas made famous when he wrote “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” for his own father.

Forecast for Mourning
(for my father-in-law)

I do not know how to remember him—
his bluster, thunder, warmth, his glassy sea.
He was like weather, changing all the time.

Like two words that almost, but do not rhyme,
that’s how we loved. We’d try, but seldom met.
I do not know how to remember him.

I’d hide a bit each time that he’d come in,
unsure if he would snarl or want to please.
He was like weather, changing all the time.

Drought. Flood. The rain with softest hands
that turns to hail. A mist that’s miles deep.
I do not know how to remember him.

White out. And the blue sky after. Wind
that breaks the limbs. And docile morning breeze.
He was like weather, changing all the time.

The memories rearrange like leaves in autumn.
What is this urge to want to rake them neat?
I do not know how to remember him.
He was like weather, changing all the time.