Poem – Page 4 – Necessary Whispers

Poem: Un/Forgiven

I have not forgiven my friend

And so the poison swells

Like maggots crawling through my veins

Stealing life

And trading it for

Death.


First one offense

And then the next

Like flames wrapping around tree trunks

Stripping a forest

And pulling it down to

Ash.


Condoning silence with justice

And building my case

Like piles of bones in a graveyard

Pricking the air with a stench

And freezing my senses in

Yesterday.


I am prolific in the art of litany–

Telling the song in repetitive stanzas

Like a clown using his flower

To squirt and squirt small children in the eyes

And leaving them

Blind.


Tall grows the wound

And consumes all my mind

Like a bomb detonating inside my heart

Melting what is soft

And drying as hard as

Stone.


“Forgive,” he said

And I laughed at his joke

Like an amused audience stuffing its face

With an excess of food and wine

And vomiting that which was meant to

Nourish.


“Release,” he whispered

And I wondered at his audacity

Like a rich man counting his money

In the secrecy of a vault

And finding the suggested cost

Exorbitant.


“Lay it down,” he sang

And I grew weary of his prodding

Like a woman being courted

With courage and desire

And in stubborn acceptance I

Trusted.


“Here it is,” I offered

And He lifted it from my arms

Like a father removing splinters

From the hands of his beloved boy

And the war that had frostbitten

So many years

Thawed

Into peace.


© Jill Szoo Wilson, 2023

Read more by Jill Szoo Wilson on Substack.

Poem: Moonlight We

The sun grows hours

Then burns them dry

Like

Tumbleweeds

Blow by the days

And we

The cattle drivers

Saddle the minutes

And ride them,

Guide them from atop

Their prickly backs.


The Sunlight We

Strap on our shoes

Tattered at the soles

To tread

A line

Publicly defined by

The rules of

Marketplace

And who the other

We’s expect us all

To be.


Astride atop

Rolling ticks and tocks

And traveling

Through noon time

Crowds of We

Is She—

An explorer whose eyes

Are lifted

Toward the sky

Inside a sea of eyes

Seeing same.


The busy pavement

Vibrates with progress

As defined

By hand held devices

That shine

In daytime rays

And ricochet

Blinding

The gaze

Of the masked We

Stumbling at a gallop’s pace.


But she—

She sees.


She sees what is real

In the moment defined

Not confined by

What she should

Why she ought or

Questioning

Why she would

She rides the time

And feels the warmth

Of the sun instead of

Using it for light.


Reflection of the sun can be seen everywhere.

Embracing now

A give and take

Of new and ideas

And what does it mean

She offers herself

To the questions

That rise

Dwells in the

Wonder

Of wandering

Free.


And he—

He sees.


Along the trail

Sprawling on every side

Is one—

A He—

Who rides his own

Tumbleweed time

Carrying boredom

Wrapped in

Discontent

Searching for what

Is relevant.


His eyes wide open

Heart behind a shield

He journeys

With a purpose

Gone cold

Like a campfire

Dwindling—

He rubs his hands together

Above reasons

That fail

To keep him warm.


Until the moment

Just one moment

He

Amidst a thousand eyes

Sees

She

The only she

In a sea of

We

Whose awareness

Pierces the shield of his own.

No words exchanged—

Not yet—

But the moment is frozen still

The sun holds its place

And reveals

Details of her face

As though

The opulent

Fiery star above

Is painting

Something new.


“Hello,”

Says she and

“Hello,”

Says he and the sea of

We begins to roar

Once again.

He asks,

“Can you travel

This way?

If only

Today?”


He smiles—

Not only his lips

But eyes brightly

Joining as

His hands begin to warm.

She accepts

His invitation,

“I will come

Your way

Let’s not delay

The sun will set into night.”


Two journeys become

One moonlight We

As the day stumbles

Behind the moon—

The moon that stops

The growth of time

Replacing stars

For minutes

And silence for sound

When all around

Disappears

Into a single

You.

© Jill Szoo Wilson, 2023

Read more by Jill Szoo Wilson on Substack.

Poem: The Reaching

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

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.

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.
Milan Kundera, Slowness

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