Poets’ Corner: Rosemerry for Thanksgiving!

23 Nov Poets’ Corner: Rosemerry for Thanksgiving!

Family, Fun, Football and Feast! The start of the holiday trifecta in nut shell: Thanksgiving. Question on the (groaning) table: What are you grateful for? Who will you miss at your banquet? Regular contributor and poet extraordinaire Word Woman Rosemerry Trommer answers with her moving words. For which we are so grateful.

Rosemerry makes a holiday of words every day of her life. 

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, credit; Joanie Schwarz.

Thanks

(by Rosemerry)

Inside each honest thank you
is a giant open-air pavilion
beside a curving and generous pond

that reflects the sky and is home
to cormorants, white egrets,
turtles, and humble ducks.

There is laughter that rings
through the archways,
wonder that wanders the paths.

There are angels that circle
each thank you spoken with love,
whether we believe in angels or not.

Every sincere expression of thanks
is a choice to meet what is good in the world
and to honor it with our attention.

There are thousands and thousands
of reasons to forget we are grateful,
and yet just one genuine thank you

builds an improbable palace
out of the moment, fills it with beauty,
shares it with the world, asks nothing in return.

Family Recipe
(November 25, 2022 by Rosemerry)

All day, I search for it,
the secret ingredient—
something my father
believed in. He always
made stuffing
with something extra,
something special,
then made us guess
what the secret was.
All day, I notice
what goes into a day—
a total of 86,400 seconds,
and in every second
a choice of how
we will meet that second.
If the day is stuffing,
then this day has
some unusual ingredients:
a couple dozen folks
in swimsuits on the sidewalk,
one woman with a dying parrot
she has tucked in her sweater,
a whole garden full of lemon trees,
one ripe hour alone
in the sunshine on a rooftop,
a generous measure of laughter
as my daughter and husband and I
climb a near-vertical hill,
and bittersweet tears
as I think of Dad
and his love of secret ingredients.
All day, the world
shows off its flavors.
All day, I revel in the recipe,
this extraordinary day,
something that can never
be made the same way again.