Autumnal

after a line from William Stafford

When the leaves are about to yellow and fall
ask me then how I tried to hold on to what was green,
how I thought perhaps I was different,
how everything I thought I knew about gold
turned brittle and brown. Ask me what it was like
to fall then. Sometimes the world’s workings feel transparent
and we know ourselves as the world. Sometimes
the only words that can find our lips are thank you,
though the gifts look nothing like anything
we ever thought we wanted. Sometimes, gratitude
arrives in us, not because we are willing,
but because it insists on itself, like a weed,
like a wind, like change.

Posted by kind permission of the poet. From Naked for Tea (Able Muse Press, 2018).

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer co-hosts Emerging Form podcast on creative process, Secret Agents of Change (a surreptitious kindness cabal) and Soul Writers Circle. Her poetry has appeared on A Prairie Home Companion, PBS News Hour, O Magazine, American Life in Poetry, Carnegie Hall stage, river rocks, and her daily poetry blog, A Hundred Falling Veils. Her most recent collection, Hush, won the Halcyon Prize. Naked for Tea was a finalist for the Able Muse Book Award. One-word mantra: Adjust.

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