A moment before, floating in the sun
My love beside me
Warm and glowing
Her eyes ablaze with rays of light
Her darkness concealed in
Illumination.
A moment before, she spoke of love
My friend beside me
Kind and gentle
Her smile warmed but burned
Her face like wax
Melting.
I wanted to see my love through the brightness of stars
The universe brought low and waiting
Swirling about my hands and mind
Becoming one with all that breathes
And pants
And lives
And dies
A moment before, I removed my gloves
My fire beside me
Trembling and stiff
Her fingers felt but did not touch
Her hand in mine only
Embers.
A moment before, she swallowed words
My pain beside me
Inflamed and suffering
Her silence thickened in my throat
Her Nothing choked
Suffocating.
I wanted to see my love through the brightness of stars
The universe brought low and waiting
Wrapping my cold in warmth
Like a child crying
But hopeful
But calming
But safe
A moment before, the snow dropped down
My hope beside me
Present and vacant
Her ruffled dress covered with water
Her boots muddied with
Goodbye.
© Jill Szoo Wilson, 2015
Tag: love
Sonnet: The Tongue of Peace
What once was whole is splitting at the seam,
With roaring tongues that never find a word.
Each stands alone, entranced by their own dream,
While fear doth arm the gates with aim absurd.
The bridge between us withers into dust,
A chasm wide where voices fade to air.
Yet in our hearts still burns this ancient trust—
The longing for a hand extending ear.
But how to reach when dread hath drawn the line?
When walls are built of pride and weary doubt?
We stand as statues, yearning for a sign,
Yet know not how to call the silence out.
O break the curse—let all division cease,
For love still speaks the only tongue of peace.
© Jill Szoo Wilson, 2025
Read more by Jill Szoo Wilson on Substack.
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
Jill Szoo Wilson 