Poets’ Corner: Rosemerry for Valentine’s Day!

12 Feb Poets’ Corner: Rosemerry for Valentine’s Day!

Did you know the Italian city of Verona, where Shakespeare’s lovers Romeo and Juliet lived, receives about 1,000 letters addressed to Juliet every Valentine’s Day?

Cynics insist the holiday is when men atone for their sins of omission by buying sweethearts toasters and scant silky undergarments. And women? We make desperate attempts to put the magic back into our relationships by swooning over professional basketball. The rest of the world, however, seems to swallow the softer, gentler notion of the holiday – like chocolate. In our view, nothing sets the tone for Valentine’s Day 2022 better than the following poems written by one of our favorite regional poets: Wordwoman, Rosemerry Trommer. Both are antidotes to the daily headlines, one reminding us to let the sun shine in; the other to practice love, not hate.

In Times of Great Darkness

I want to do for you
what the sun does for me—
coax you to come
outside, to breathe in
the golden air.
I want to warm you
and enter you,
fill you with brilliance,
make your muscles melt,
make your mind shush.
I want to prepare for you
luminous paths
that span across deep space,
thaw any part of you
that feels frozen,
find any cracks
and slip shine into them.
And your shadow,
I want to intensify it
so you might better know
your own shape.
I want to encourage you
to open, wider, wider,
want to teach you
to write your name
in light.

What We’re Doing Here

This is why we are here—
not merely to survive
but to fall in love
with the white-breasted hawk
and the rainbow fish,
with the lonely sidewalk
and the shadows of ourselves,
fall in love with the hands
of the woman wearing yellow
and the girl who loves chocolate
and the boy who loves cars
and the man who makes us want to be
a better version of ourself.

We are here to fall into unmanageable love—
to love beyond reason, beyond
fact, beyond certainty. We are here
to lose all our ideas about love
and know it as the next choice
we make, the next word
we say, the next invitation
we offer ourselves.

We are here to love
the world and each other
the way whales love water,
the way blue loves a peacock,
the way night blooming jasmine
loves night.