As Mentioned in the Podcast:
In this week’s podcast, we mentioned a poem I wrote about my dear friend Sally Estes when she was told she had three months to live. Here I am reading the poem. It’s also printed below.
They Say It’s the Best Bloom in Ten Years
—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
She wants to go see the bluebonnets, she says.
This is after she tells me they’ve said she has three months to live.
And I want to find her vast fields of bluebonnets,
acres and acres of white-tipped blue bloom.
And I want to send her more springs to see them in,
more days to live one day at a time. I want to remove
the pain in her belly, the pain that aggressively grows.
I want to make deals with the universe. Want to say no
to the way things are. I want to tell death to wait.
I want to tell life to find a way. I want to hug her
until she believes she’s beloved. I want to give her
the pen that will write every brave thing
that she’s been unable to say. There are days
when we feel how uncompromising it is, the truth.
How human we are. There are days when the bluebonnets
stretch as far as the eye can see. There are days
we know nothing is more important than going to see them,
a billion blue petals all nodding in the wind, teaching us to say yes.
—forthcoming in Hush, Middle Creek Publishing, 2020
Bonus: Rosemerry reads a poem she wrote for a dying friend