A Daily Dose of Poetry

A Hundred Falling Veils

• Castilleja angustifolia April 6, 2020
    It’s not that they are hiding— it’s more that they know the power of a red dress. Between slabs of red sandstone, the tiny yellow green flowers of the desert paintbrush decorate themselves with bright red bracts, colorful flame-like spears that attract butterflies, hummingbirds and bees.   It’s what we do to survive, those […]
  Rosemerry
• Wanting a Fractal Love April 5, 2020
  Eadem mutata resurgo Latin motto: Changed, I rise again     Sometimes in spring I can still find the dried seeds of the mountain mahogany clinging to the ends of the branches— feathery golden spirals, logarithmic and light.   How the universe loves a pattern, an elegant mathematics— this same spiral is found in spider […]
  Rosemerry
• Hope April 4, 2020
  Hope has holes in its pockets. It leaves little crumb trails so that we, when anxious, can follow it. Hope’s secret: it doesn’t know the destination— it knows only that all roads begin with one foot in front of the other.
  Rosemerry
• Poetry for the Pandemic: We Recorded the Reading April 4, 2020
  Hello Friends, If you were unable to join us live for our April 3, 2020, reading, you can catch me and my friend Albert Flynn DeSilver doing a special online reading … about an hour long total. We each read for 15 minutes at the beginning, then open it up for a discussion based on […]
  Rosemerry
• Sign of Inner Spring April 3, 2020
    Every year the pussy willows surprise me with their willingness to be soft in a time when the rest of the world is stick-ish and harsh and bare.   There they are beside the low stream, fluffy silver tufts, furry, silken, new. But the velvet has purpose: protective hairs grown to guard an imminent […]
  Rosemerry
• A Letter to the Woman in My Calendar April 2, 2020
  Dear Other Version of Myself,   In my calendar, it’s April second and you are going to an event tonight at a bookstore in another town where the people will gather and hug each other and taste each other’s wine. You live in a world that no longer exists, and every day I try to […]
  Rosemerry
• Viola Tricolor April 1, 2020
  also known as Johnny jump up, heart’s ease, heart’s delight, come and cuddle me     Into the shade by the porch bloomed the first wild pansy, its small yellow face sunny and eager and open.   The Athenians used to make the tiny flowers into syrup to moderate anger and to comfort and strengthen […]
  Rosemerry
• Respiratory March 31, 2020
  This morning, after the blizzard, after the sun came out, there was a moment when the shadows of the empty cottonwood trees patterned the snow like tree-sized lungs— the trunk was a bronchus, and the branches, bronchioles that split into twiggish alveoli. And the tree seemed to say, Remember. I often neglect to be grateful […]
  Rosemerry
• Gratitude March 30, 2020
      Gratitude, it happens, needs less room to grow than one might think— is able to find purchase on even the slenderest of ledges, is able to seed itself in even the poorest of soils.   Just today, I marveled as a small gratitude took root in the desert of me— like a juniper […]
  Rosemerry
• Dear Somebody’s Version of Albert, March 29, 2020
    *Dear readers: Sooooo. After really investing myself in the letter (linked below) and writing the poem below, I found out the letter is a fake. And I thought about just taking down the poem. And then I thought, well, even though Albert didn’t write the letter, I still believe in what it says. So […]
  Rosemerry