If ever a UFO landed on your head—
“She thinks that's a weird question.
No UFO has!”
I wasn’t talking to you.
But to you . . .
Pretend one has.
What do you think it would feel like?
Imagine it.
Go on.
I will wait.
[A sparrow flies by]
I am not asking how heavy it is or
Cold or
Bumpy or
Smooth:
You could not really know such things
At all.
I am asking what you would feel like inside—
“She would feel like an idiot!”
But if it was really there . . . on your head—
“On her head? What is this ridiculous riddle?”
Okay not on your head, but over . . .
If you ran out of your home
With no where to go
Your hair was torn and
Bruises and
The smell of whiskey
And cigars
On your face—
If your shoes were untied
And you saw your mother cry
And you didn’t want to stay
One more second
In that place.
If the air was so cold
You could see your breath
Shooting into the night
Like a jet engine beginning a race
So you slowed your pace
And panted and heaved
And your knees buckle under you
With disgrace.
Let us pretend the aloneness
You feel—
“It’s just a feeling, she's not alone!”
But still . . .
Your aloneness is real
With no one to call
And if you turned back now
You would be thrown against a wall.
So despite your
Aloneness
You crawl
To safety and the blackest woods
You embrace.
If in that space
You held on tight to a
Branch you could reach
Or the neck of a deer
Or the paw of a bear
Until
At last
You saw glowing near
A rounded
Machine with light bulbs you could see
And a sound you could hear
Like a robot giving chase.
What would you think—
“She would think she was nuts!”
Okay, maybe. But . . .
Would you believe your eyes
Or think your sanity was disguised
In the brain of a woman
Otherwise apt?
If you could touch and
Feel
Would you believe it was real?
And what about smell?
If you could smell the exhaust
Coming from the pipe
And taste the metal on the
Wind of the night
And hear a voice shrieking,
“We come from someplace” . . .
If it landed and
A hand
Came out from within
Would you look at your fingers
And kiss them goodbye
In case after touching they never returned
But still reach them out
And touch the warmth
Of an unknown hand
Unrecognizable
And trust
Even before you could see his face?
You can answer now—
“She doesn't want to answer,
She thinks you’ve gone mad!”
But there is no madness in the question. It is only a question . . .
“Yes,” she said.
And continued on,
“If I knew I was alone
Even in a crowd
And the sky delivered a mystery
I would.
Reach out.
And be brought in.”
Thank you for your honesty—
“Thanks for nothing, you mean!”
But thank you for telling the truth.
With a pair of eyes
Belonging only to her
She looked at the man
With the question,
“I would.”
© Jill Szoo Wilson, 2025
Category: Poems and Sonnets
Poem: Order From Chaos
Long ago two young men drew a map of the sky
Laying on their backs, perhaps,
Like children in tents with holes in the tops
They counted and connected the stars.
Order from chaos was formed in their eyes
Squinting into darkness
Blinded not by light but by enormity
And mysteries invisibly connected.
They traced routes with their fingers, point A to B,
Like homemade kites pursuing the way
With windy anticipation and
Lines to find what was or was not connected.
As the men grew beards, their love of the sky
Fell to the earth and to pieces.
Shatters of themselves were given away
To money, ambition, and work: disconnected.
One of the two held hands with success
Palms sweaty together and traveling
With compass pointed away from the heavens
And down to notifications and contacts: connected?
The other man poured his life slowly
Like a cup spilling over his family—a wife and two kids—
He drained all he had, a deluge of hope
And then gurgled and gasped as the woman fled: disconnected.
Alone—surprised by aloneness—
The un-wifed man lifted the tips of his naked fingers to the sky.
Suspended in air his hand wished to feel
To touch, to reach, to caress, to connect.
No alien hand reached with fingers to intertwine
So the man looked down, instead.
A tear dripped from his eye and onto his future:
Two children—looking up from the ground—
Counting and connecting the stars.
© Jill Szoo Wilson, 2015
Poem: God of the Street
What if God was as close as
The domed ceiling of an antiquated church—
Walls lines with stained glass
Depictions of before and after
Christ invaded the story
The history of man
A broader narration
An epic
A comedy
A tragedy
A lineage of life and death
And birth and
Resurrection.
The grandiose nature of
The Alpha and Omega—
The beginning and the end—
Could not be contained
The stained glass rattles
The musty, dusty wood
That used to be trees stretching
Tall in majestic places
Now bowing to parishioners
Waiting for
Waiting for
The release of weight
When men and women
Stand to their feet
Applaud and proclaim
Praise to the One that lives
Beyond the dome—
Outside the temple erected
His focus directed on each one
Who walks the streets
Umbrellas and tissue
And glasses and backpacks
Catering to their earthly needs
All the while moving inside
An invisible song
Pervasive notes swirling
In the air
The breath of God in the wind
His playfulness in
The wings of fluttering birds
His rejuvenation in colorful promises
Of spring
His love in the eyes of those
Who hold hands
His peace in the frogs croaking
Their midnight serenades.
He whose visage
Hangs in the churches
Broke through the walls to
Walk side by side
No dome
No tomb
No misunderstanding
No doubt
No running
No running
Can hold the God of
Everywhere
Prostrate
To our wood and plaster and
Ornately
Drawn windows:
It is we whose frames are weak
It is we whose knees
Must bend
Whose heads must bow—
It is our shatters
Our shards that the
Incense picks up and carries
Into the atmosphere
Palpable with life
And into the nostrils of He
Who broke through the dome.
© Jill Szoo Wilson, 2016
Poem: Of Melody and of Moan
The sky is hot like leather
Brown and coating our skin
With beads surging into streams
Of sweat
In the distance
A lonely guitar throbs
Crooning refrains of love
And regret
We toil long and
Hum the oscillating songs
One by one to forget
The hour
Bugs sway back and forth
On blades of green
Tired and scorched by fever and
By life
Women tell stories
Laugh with heads thrown back
Simple versions of disaster pulsate in
Their smiles
Men with sinewy arms
Pull from the lazy earth
Swollen roots of sustenance and
Of dreams
Children thump the ground
Like ragtime drummers
Beating rhythms of play and
Far away
The musician strums andante
Caressing silvery strings releasing
Vibrations of melody and
Of moan.
© Jill Szoo Wilson, 2023
Poem: Slowness
There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting. A man is walking down the street. At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him. Automatically, he slows down.
Milan Kundera, Slowness
Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himself from a thing still too close to him in time.
In existential mathematics that experience takes the form of two basic equations: The degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.
Kundera, man. This guy just knows how to pierce into and extend a metaphor.
The question his thoughts inspire in me today is this: when we travel from the present moment to our memories–or an imagined future–does the speed of life around us change? How do we move from our imaginations to our current surroundings? Slowly or with speed?
Slowness
By Jill Szoo Wilson
A breeze blows through my window
proclaims,
"I wants to write,"
as it lifts the pages of my notepad–
the crinkling sound of paper–
no–
the sound of pages running across a sidewalk
though no footsteps follow behind.
Free, the pages tumble
twist into a roll–
double back salto tucked with a triple twist–
a pigeon holds up a sign,
"7 out of 10."
It had to be the pigeon.
No one else was paying attention.
The fluttering of the notebook page
pulls me back into the moment–
how many sounds have I forgotten to hear?
Do I hear the past
more loudly than today?
How many hours echo through a chamber of disparate chatter?
A dog is barking,
a squirrel's claws are tapping the inside of my ceramic pot,
I'm humming a song that was sung to me once,
the pigeon is bored–
he flys away.
©Jill Szoo Wilson, 2023
Sonnet: In Defense of Imperfection
This sonnet is inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s famous quote, “There is no exquisite beauty without some strangeness in the proportion,” from his short story “Ligeia.” In Poe’s tale, the beauty of the mysterious woman Ligeia is entwined with an otherworldly, unsettling strangeness, thus highlighting the idea that beauty often thrives in imperfection.
The sonnet explores this concept, celebrating the beauty found in things that are off-center, crooked, and flawed. It suggests that it is the very strangeness of these things that makes them remarkable and worthy of our time and attention.
There is no beauty forged in flawless light—
It twists where shadows linger at the seam.
A crooked branch may catch the morning right
And cast the roots of wonder into dream.
A freckled rose, off-center in its bloom,
Will hold the gaze far longer than the best.
The stars are never silent in their room;
They flicker strange and waken eyes at rest.
The pearl was born from pressure, pain, and grit.
The sea’s rough hand gave shape to something rare.
So let the world tell tales of perfect wit—
I’ll choose the crooked with a bend that’s fair.
For beauty, true, is never fully tamed—
Its strangeness is the reason it is named.
© Jill Szoo Wilson, 2025
Poem: Unzipped
Born into the beauty of Spring
Between a fog-covered morning and
Daffodils breezily performing
A ballet in minor keys
She was touched first by the sun
Tenderly
Warmly
Our greatest star floated down
Like a blanket,
Covering.
Her mother was gentle
Hands soft and graceful—
Rose petals against her fingers
Blushed in their inadequacy
To soothe pain
With placid refrains of
Touch
Sliding down from
Cheeks to chins
With whispers thin.
Her father worked the fields
Gathered to his chest
The yields he nurtured
From seeds into
Future nourishment
Carried
In straw-colored baskets
To a town where
Eyes lit with hellos and
Hands shook with goodbyes.
Buried deep inside
The beauty young
A grain of aberration was planted—
Roots grew long and
Slanted downward
Spreading wide
Like awns on Wheat
Piercing delicate organs
Changing the beat
Of her sunflower heart.
Melancholia filled the pasture
Of her mind
A harvest inward
Pulling
Watered by heredity
Drowned in mystery
Tears stagnant
Hidden
Breeding mosquitos
Draining from within.
Born into the beauty of Spring
She lived in the landscape of Winter
Bracing against snow-filled torrents
Of frozen joy—
A sculptor of ice into smiles
A painter of masks
Detailing profiles
Desperate to delight
Those she could not disappoint—
Ashamed to bare only flickering light.
Her mother named her Bliss
Her father called her Life
They held her hands
Through seasons passing
Interlocked their fingers
With her plans
Held her high for every eye
To marvel and admire
Proud of the child, the woman
They knew her to be.
Her outside
Belied
Silent cries—
A contrast of
Cheerful attainment to
Sorrowful containment
Wrenching from
The wish to please
To the reality of
Brokenness.
As Autumn sang
Its songs of change
She unzipped her disguise
Let her discrepancy fall
And her hopelessness rise—
A coffin soft
Burlap and heavy
She sunk into the shadow
Where finally she could hide
From sunshine and from lies.
© Jill Szoo Wilson, 2016
Jill Szoo Wilson 