sharon scholl |
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Sharon Scholl, Ph.D., is professor emeritus at Jacksonville University (FL) where she taught Humanities and Non-Western Studies. She has three published poetry collections: Unauthorized Biographies, All Points Bulletin, and Message on a Branch. She lives in Atlantic Beach, Florida, near her daughters and grandchildren. |
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The slowness of trees—
how the sun falls through
foliage with such deliberation
and the wind hardly moves
this tall leaf kingdom built
on a low, ripping hill.
"Wait" is what it tells me.
"There is no time but now,"
nothing more important
than sitting on a log taking
quiet into me like slaking
a long-hidden thirst.
Tomorrow has no name, no list
of obligations. Today counts time
in colored flecks falling gently
from distant branches,
striking the ground with the hushed
tick of an ancient clock.
I lack hearing keen enough
to decipher insect boring, the scurrying
of rodents, the high whine
of dragonflies beating air.
Even the wind's leaf whispering
is too subtle for my ears.
My world still booming in my head,
I sit and mull things over like a gullible
girl before a fortune teller,
hoping to receive some earthly
wisdom from trees who've seen it all,
but grant me only silence. |
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The world works not by physics
but by stasis, those blank intervals
when anything could happen
and nothing usually does.
It is the law of queues, the shuffle
forward limp of wasted time
illustrating the universal imbalance
between liners-up and checkers-out.
Life sputters into boredom
on a rainy, bookless afternoon
with the TV on the blink
and nobody who'll risk our sniffles.
No strategies have been devised
for mortals who cannot hibernate
to prevent these lapses in time's flow.
The daydream is our best defense. |
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My exhausted eyes drift and flicker
over the florid excess, the revelry
of shapes and colors that vitalize
her days. Rug laps rug,
their varied patterns in contention.
Walls bristle with pictorial display.
Shawls and pillows litter couches
like wind-blown residue.
Adventures of a lifetime peopled
with the famous and obscure
are chronicled in stacks of clippings,
programs cast from faded concerts.
I stand at her door and marvel,
but my tea house self craves
the bones of things, to see
light unhindered spread
like frosting on a wall,
to feel space reach around me
in a loose embrace, the naked floor
stretch out its grainy wooden sheen.
I need to stroll unimpeded
into rooms laid out in Shaker order,
my memories tucked modestly away
behind doors swung on silent hinges. |
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