<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body style="overflow-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;"><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><div dir="auto"><div dir="ltr"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">Reciting Poems to Each Other in a Difficult Time</span><div dir="auto" style="overflow-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;"><div dir="auto" style="overflow-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><br><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><br><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">It might have looked as if we stayed</span><br><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">in our respective squares—</span><br><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">nine separate rooms made of pixels—</span><br><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">but for an hour the poems we shared leaped</span><br><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">through the screen and into our bloodstream</span><br><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">until all our lines were gloriously blurred</span><br><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">and our wounds were gently tended</span><br><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">by the medicine of Berry’s dayblind stars</span><br><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">and Wellwood’s ferocious dance of no hope,</span><br><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">Hopkins’s shining from shook foil</span><br><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">and Roethke’s wondering Which I is I?</span><br><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">In another time, there would have been</span><br><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">a fire at the center. Someone would play a drum.</span><br><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">But in this time, I felt it inside me, the fire,</span><br><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">as poems blazed to meet the great cold.</span><br><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">I felt it inside me, the human drum,</span><br><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">that reminds me the heart beats</span><br><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">not for itself, but the world.</span><br><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">For an hour we spooned each other</span><br><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">the honey of poetry. Alone now,</span><br><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">I still taste it, unfiltered and raw,</span><br><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">this astonishing sweetness on my lips,</span><br><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">this salt of lyric communion,</span><br><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">still feel the warmth of that blaze,</span><br><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">the spark still dazzling in the dark.</span><br><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><br><span style="text-wrap-mode: wrap;"> <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>- </span><span style="text-wrap-mode: wrap;">Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer</span></div></div></div><br id="lineBreakAtBeginningOfSignature"><div dir="ltr"><br><!-- signature close --></div></div></body></html>