by Mark Trinka / Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer wants a word that means devastated and stunned with joy at once. Mark Trinka found the poem under the Christmas tree and ended up mounting it floor to ceiling.
For When People Ask
by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
I want a word that means
okay and not okay,
more than that: a word that means
devastated and stunned with joy.
I want the word that says
I feel it all all at once …
Mark’s Reflection
I was introduced to this poem last Christmas when my oldest son offered it as a gift to the family. It immediately resonated as a human experience we can all embrace — the roiling emotions we carry about the world we occupy. We clearly have time and energy to hold both things in our hands: the horrible and the beautiful.
Why was I only focusing on the despair? Is this who I am becoming? Has my heart hardened? A resonant no is announced by the poet: we can and will be able to see the beauty of it all, even in its fraught nature. I aspire to grasp the complexity — rife with devastation and ripe with joy.
Arguably my practice with this poem might be extreme. I blew it up to wall size and mounted it in my office in a floor-to-ceiling visual, as a good reminder of the equanimity of our being.
How the Word Works
Trommer reaches for an unfamiliar image — the Tuvan throat singer, capable of sounding a drone and its harmonics simultaneously. She needs something most of us have never heard to get us to stop and consider the simultaneous presence of grief and wonder, despair and delight.
This is what poetry does when it is working at its best. It finds the image that ordinary vocabulary has no room for, and in finding it, gives us permission to feel what we already feel but could not yet say.
Trommer is no stranger to the polarity she names. She has written openly out of profound personal loss, and she did not write this poem from a safe distance. She wrote it from inside the swirl.
A Simple Practice
Mark mounted the poem on his office wall. You need not go that far, though you might.
This week, write down the poem’s two closing lines (into this world so rife with devastation,
this world so ripe with joy) and place them somewhere you will see them. When the weight of the world presses in, let the second be available to you — not as a denial of the first, but as its companion..
Mark’s Bio
Mark is crafty — crafting music festivals, specialty coffee, craftiness on the tennis court, and craft beer are among his avocations. He grew up in Riverside as the youngest of seven children and has spent most of his adult life in Oak Park with his wife, Bernadette Diaz. Their four adult children brought the family into Old St. Patrick’s around 2008. He was invited to Still Point by a friend and describes himself as still on the periphery — but one who has found in this community retreats, honest conversation, and what he calls an online capaciousness of spirit.
Poems, Parables & Proverbs was a Sunday email series shared with the Still Point community through the summer of 2026. Each week offered a text, a reflection from a member of our community, and a simple practice for the week ahead.