Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: "Guilty Bystander"

[Poet's note: "This Christmas [2010], my six-year-old son taught me the lesson of how valuable it can be to pay attention—a found poem."]
 

 

The gate of heaven is everywhere.

—Thomas Merton, “Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander”

“I don’t know,”
says Finn,
and I forget

what that first

question was,
but speaking

into the microphone

of the karaoke machine,
I then asked him,

“What do you know

for sure?”
And he says

into his mic,

“If you only
ask Santa

for one present,

he’ll bring it to you.”
I ask him,

“What else do you know?”

The reverb knob
is turned to max

so his quick answer

bounces around
the room, “Sometimes

nothing can be true.”

So I ask him,
“What else?”

and he says,

“The world
changes.”

"Guilty Bystander" by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer. Published online at Virtual Teahouse, the poet's blog, on December 25, 2010.

Photography credit: Image by unknown photographer, found at this link (originally color).