13 Feb Poets’ Corner: Rosemerry for Valentine’s Day!
Valentine’s Day began as a mid-February ancient Roman fertility festival (Lupercalia). Later the event was overlaid with the feast day of Saint Valentine, a largely obscure Christian martyr, and only became associated with romance in the Middle Ages. That shift came when poets — most notably Geoffrey Chaucer — linked February 14 to courtly love and the mating of birds. By the Victorian era, handwritten notes evolved into printed cards, commerce followed sentiment, and the modern holiday took shape.
Valentine’s Day endures because it ritualizes something quite fragile: the act of renewing affection, below summed up beautifully, simply and poignantly by the sentiments expressed in the two poems by Word Woman Rosemerry Trommer.
Please scroll down to check out her pearls and learn more about the poet herself.
In My Obituary
They will not write
about how, every
night in sleep,
somehow my hand
found your hand,
or how, before dinner
each night we light
candles and then
say something kind
before we eat.
They will not mention
how you would do
dishes for me and I
would do dishes for you,
nor how I never once
needed to ask you
to wax my skis
because it was
already done.
But more than any
title or degree,
these daily moments
are what shape a life—
these moments that
make us, these moments
that no one else sees.
AND…
Once I Wanted Only Openness
Every day I tend it again,
this fence around our hearts.
I rebuild it each time I say no
to things that would take me away
from you. I rebuild it each time
I choose to be right here.
I rebuild it and thrill in the rebuilding,
each post of the fence is a love letter,
this fence I once tried to burn.
Rosemerry, more:
Fnd this poem (and thousands more) at Rosemerry’s daily poetry blog: “A Hundred Falling Veils,”website: wordwoman.com
Most recent books: “All the Honey and The Unfolding”
Daily poetry app for a phone: “The Poetic Path”
Weekly podcast on creative process: “Emerging Form”
TEDx talk: “The Art of Changing Metaphors: TEDX Rosemerry Trommer
poetry album Risking Love”
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