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
Tag: Poetry
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 