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Driving into San Miguel Canyon, about one mile from the intersection with Highway 62, travelers may spot a box at a roadside pullout.

“I had it in my head, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to have a place on the highway where people could take poems,’” said local poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer.

“People pull over here all the time to talk on the phone or rummage around in their backseat for something,” Trommer said. “I thought, ‘Well, maybe they would stop and get a poem.’”

So Trommer had her husband build a box — more like a notice board seen at a trailhead — for poems.

A poetry box.

The box stands more than 6 feet tall and is painted bright yellow with purple, blue, orange and green flowers.

“It has a glass door that opens into a cork board where I post poems, and other people can also post poems there,” Trommer said. “To that end, there is a pullout drawer that has pens and pencils and cardstock papers, and you could write your own poem on a foldout desk. It’s a perfect height. Standing right here by the highway, you could write a poem and post it right inside that gorgeous little cabinet.”

While it stands alone on the side of the road, Trommer sees it as a community gathering place.

“It is such a sweet way for us to communicate with each other, especially because we are so far-flung,” Trommer said. “I have to tell you how much I love that it isn’t digital. I’m looking at one that was clearly written by Art Goodtimes. Who would not recognize Art Goodtimes’ handwriting once you had seen it? That is something you don’t get on the computer, something so personal. Even the ripped edge of the paper — just to see people’s handwriting and have it up in an old-fashioned way. The humanity of it is so exciting to me.”

In the hubbub of technology and artificial intelligence, Trommer believes poetry helps people explore what it means to be human.

“What it is to regret. What it is to wonder. What it is to feel two things at the very same time and feel tugged in opposite directions and know that’s what it is,” Trommer said. “That we are the all of it. I love the way poems bring this out. It just allows us to show up as our raw, imperfect selves.”

A smattering of poems fills the box, with different handwriting scrawled across the pages.

The featured poem on this day is “Instructions on Not Giving Up” by former U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón.

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

• Ada Limón

“One of the things I love about this poem, and I feel like it’s really at the heart of the poetry box, is this clarity that things are hard,” Trommer said. “Sometimes you want to give up. I know I do. How do we go on? Here is the poem, and here’s the trees, and they show us this is how we go on. We honor the world around us. We honor each other. We do it slow and patiently. It doesn’t happen very fast.”

So, while driving down the highway of life — or Colorado Highway 145 — at top speed, take a moment to slow down, pause and write a poem.