
Training With Words
Sangha member Debra Elise Wöhrmann regularly selects a poem to share on our website. For this selection, Debra writes: “Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer knows loss and pain and has decided the way through and the practice that has saved her is gratitude, giving, and plunge after plunge into the river as it rushes and sometimes whirls in an eddy.
That’s how I see her practice of writing a poem a day—and sharing. “Carpe Diem”—her January 15th offering—speaks to the core of what brings us together: We need to be just as we are and allow the same of others, she writes, while “noticing how / love grows in that most rich soil— / not the thick clay of longing for things.” May you enjoy this poem.”
Carpe Diem
Every day you have less reason not to give yourself away.
—Wendell Berry, 1993, I
Knowing today brings the day of my death
one day closer, I decide to love you more.
By which I mean, I decide
to practice letting myself be
exactly who I am and letting you be
exactly who you are and noticing how
love grows in that most rich soil—
not the thick clay of longing for things
to be different, but the good loam
of reality. Our time here is too dear
to be spent with fruitless wishing.
In this generous earth of allowing,
what might grow? Real love.
The kind that requires nothing
but our laughter and tears,
our anger and forgiveness, our frustration
and tenderness. I feel love root anew
in this ground where soon enough
I, too, will belong. Do you feel it, too,
the blooming between us, this love
that asks only for us
to be faithfully ourselves?