Two Poems by Grace Rossman

Eclipse
4.12.24

We have been driving for five hours.
… Driving is a strong word for it.
Crawling forward, miles of highway inching by in slow motion….

There are moments when it seems like there is no way we’re going to make it:
A march of cars stretching ahead of us as far as the eye can see;
All of us here for the same thing–
The same, fleeting, beautiful thing–

I hear the love of my life as he starts singing next to me.
As he reaches for my hand from the driver’s seat,
I remember all the times this man has held me
When I have failed to hold the world;
How he traced shapes on the palms of my hands
When I couldn’t get the taste of blood out of my mouth–
The aftertaste of massacres I only ever read about–
Still they burn in my memory too bright–

I know I've been sick with something so much bigger than myself,
And I wonder if maybe we all are.
Maybe inside every car is someone struggling to bear this too-bright life;
Maybe we’re all here in desperate hope
That for a moment, there’ll be a respite,
A blessed break from the blaze
Of 24 hour cycles of news and violence
And reminders that after 300,000 years sharing this planet,
We still don’t know how to live under this one sun together.
Thousands of years we’ve been driving this car–
Driving seems like much too strong a word for 
Crawling 
Slowly,
Painfully forward–

And sometimes, it feels like there is no way we’re going to make it.
I can’t tell if we're about to break down or break through,
But just now–
Just when it seemed like we’d never get here–
Here we are:

Somewhere–

An open field,
All of us here
For the same thing–

We shield our eyes,
Put down our phones,
And watch the moon eat up the whole of that big star;
Darkness falls over my love and me and all these strangers
Turned fellow wonderers for these sweet seconds–

Time stands still,
And folds in on itself,
And disappears.

In the glow of the corona it is all clear:
The antidote to a sickness so much bigger than ourselves
Lies in the moments that are even bigger than that.
In this sun crown I see the highest selves of all of us–
In the sky and in my lover’s eyes, the same light–
In a stranger and in my enemy, and in the darkness, the same light,
The same moon-softened, luminous, pearlescent, glory–

We have been searching for this story but it has been too bright to read it;
Here, in this midday twilight, we can all see it.

Ode to a Bare Tree

Every year you lose yourself;
You lose part of you anyway.
You watch as all that you’ve grown falls so easily from your fingers,
And you remember
The budding days, early May when the first whispers of green returned,
When everything was still possible–

And you remember the long, lush days, 
Leaves like hands stretching wide open,
When early morning was a birdsong ballad and after dinner was still golden…

And you remember when the first chill ignited
That latent fire you must have been hiding in your fibers this whole time–

Was that you?
In orange and red, 
Vivacious and vivid?
Was it you in late July,
Glowing green next to the river?
Was it you with blossoms on you in late April, blushing pink?
Or do you think this, here is you–
Bare and exposed,
Stripped down to your branches,
Naked as a skeleton?

Is this you, unobscured, the core of you in plain view,
Or, is the stuff that’s missing the stuff that made you, you?
Have you lost yourself, or found it?
And can you help me find myself?

Every year I lose myself;
I lose part of me anyway.
It feels like all I’ve grown slips dizzyingly through my fingers,
And even though I know this is just part of the cycle,
I can’t help but remember back to the budding days–
When the moon in me was waxing, when the passion was still green,
When hope burst forth like blossoms, unrealistic, over-keen,  

And I can’t help but remember the lush summer leaves of me,
When the sunlight filtered through me, 
When even sadnesses looked golden,

And I can’t help but remember the fire in me–
Feeling my colors rush, outspoken, out of my head,
Into the open, those blessed moments when the reds in me
Weren’t scared to show their faces, 
After seasons of preparation, sweet scarlet liberation–

And seconds after this exaltation, I feel the winter in me set in.
It seems we meet again, stripped down to our brown bones;
We did it again, mistook each season for the truth–
Forgot the foliage and fanfare were just a visiting act.

You remind me that our colors are of us but they are not us;
I remind you of your reminder in the moments when you’ve forgotten this.
Is this us, the part that holds the whole story every year?
This trunk that harbors multitudes, these branches that speak canopy;
Is this us? Bare and evergreen, even when there is no green, 
Even when we lose ourselves, finding ourselves, whole. 

Grace Rossman is a poet and expressive arts therapist living in Salem, Massachusetts. She received a BA from Bard College at Simon’s Rock in Critical Geography, Political Ecology, and Globalization Studies, and she went on to receive her MA in Clinical Counseling with a specialization in expressive arts therapy from Lesley University. Throughout her life, Grace has written and performed poetry and has taught spoken word poetry in schools, after school programs, and community centers. Grace is interested in the power of words to transform and heal individuals and cultures alike, and she seeks to explore these dimensions of the creative process in her writing and her work as a therapist. Her work centers around themes of identity, womanhood, healing, and connecting with our shared human experience in an increasingly divided world.