Certain I can’t carry
another sadness,
I step outside
and let the shine
of the mid-morning sun
stroke my cheek
like a lover.
And the air has a strange
bright citrus tang.
I inhale it
again and again.
Whatever it means
to be alive,
it has something
to do with this—
scent of leaf
and spruce and shadow.
The astonishing warmth
of a late October day.
The weight
of loving another,
that weight
without which
I would be nothing.
~Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer “Whatever It Means” from The Wonderment: Poems

Night and day
seize the day, also the night —
a handful of water to grasp.
The moon shines off the mountain
snow where grizzlies look for a place
for the winter’s sleep and birth.
I just ate the year’s last tomato
in the year’s fatal whirl.
This is mid-October, apple time.
I picked them for years.
One Mcintosh yielded sixty bushels.

Fifty years later we hold each other looking
out the windows at birds, making dinner,
a life to live day after day, a life of
dogs and children and the far wide country
out by rivers, rumpled by mountains.
So far the days keep coming.
Seize the day gently as if you loved her.
~Jim Harrison, from “Carpe Diem” from Dead Man’s Float

What prayer or magic spell or luck
leaves us breathless, thunder struck
just from looking in each other’s eyes
across the breakfast table? Surprise
of love comes as a kind of Divine Grace,
as if I’d never seen your face
before and now am stunned that you adore
the likes of me; whatever for
I do not know but now you’re stuck
and seem enamored of my face, its every ruck
and deep crevasse your sheer delight; it defies
all reason. Yet this spell causes us to rise
and with no word we tenderly embrace.
The sweetest feelings rush to fill the space
as if God came in through an open door
and we are nothing like we were before.
~Red Hawk “The Transformation” from #45 – Fall 2014
Tribute to Poets of Faith

Over forty-five years later,
the days keep coming,
a life lived together
day after day after day.

I try not to take a single one for granted,
each morning
a gift to be seized gently,
embraced with reverent gratitude.

There is so much to cling to,
as if this were the only day,
the only night,
knowing it can never come again.

There is so much that has passed,
like a blink –
we wonder where time disappears to,
where it hides after it disappears over the horizon.

There is so much to remember
and never forget.
There is so much yet to come
that is unknowable.

So I seize each day,
oh so gently,
like a lover.