Trommer's Temple

Unfixed poem

Dear readers,

May the lines of this extraordinary poem be a balm for all that ails—a prayer to repair the covenant between mind and body.

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Temple

O body, cracked bell

that still sings when struck,

O leaky cup,

O broken stem,

I love you, body,

your crooked path,

your crumbling walls,

your faulty math.

I love the way

you stopped believing

you could ever

hold it all,

how you began

to let yourself

become the one

that’s being held.

I love the graffiti

on your inner halls—

scrawled names of all

who shaped you.

O body, my wreck,

my holey glove,

my street worn sole,

my crumpled page,

forgive me for years

of trying to fix you,

for believing the fable

of whole,

you, my perfect

wounded heart,

my stuttered hymn,

my sacred

begging bowl.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer co-hosts Emerging Form (a podcast on creative process), Secret Agents of Change (a surreptitious kindness cabal) and Soul Writer’s Circle. Her poetry has appeared on A Prairie Home Companion, PBS News Hour, O Magazine, American Life in Poetry, on Carnegie Hall stage, and on river rocks she leaves around town. Her collection Hush won the Halcyon Prize. Naked for Tea was a finalist for the Able Muse Book Award. Rosemerry has been writing and sharing a poem a day since 2006. Find her daily poems on her blog, A Hundred Falling Veils or a curated version (with optional prompts) on her daily audio series, The Poetic Path, available on your phone with the Ritual app. She is the author of Exploring Poetry of Presence II: Prompts to deepen your writing practice, and her poetry album, Dark Praise, explores “endarkenment,” available anywhere you listen to music. Her most recent collection is All the Honey.