The Zingara Project

Tag: Sharon Scholl

  • December by Sharon Scholl

    i

    The cottonwoods come down
    last among the shedders,
    come in piles like leather napkins
    folded brown and gold.
    Wind swirls them into speckled hills,
    mattresses for leaping children.
    I’ve watched the cutting loose
    as each twig cast its fate on air,
    the whole like silent snow,
    space a-flutter with gentle death.

    ii

    There are things we can’t hold onto,
    joys that slip from our bodies
    at the stroke of time.
    They float quietly away
    beyond the comfort of grief. We pull
    them from our minds, bend over them
    like firelight, warming old bones
    in the radiance of what used to be.

    —

    Sharon Scholl is a retired college professor of humanities and international studies. Her recently published chapbooks include Summer’s Child (Finishing Line Press) and EAT SPACE (Poet Press). She convenes A Gathering of Poets, critique group of a dozen local poets celebrating our twelfth anniversary.

  • Nightscape by Sharon Scholl

    When you reflect on darkness,
    that it doesn’t thrust forward
    but shrinks to secret corners,

    when you see how birds
    fold languidly into it, cheeping
    softly in their feathers,

    the way cats’ eyes expand, yellow
    pupils taking furry draughts
    of its enticing blackness,

    how it spreads its viscous skirts
    over jeweled windows and ruinous
    gutters, over kisses and slaps,

    washing over feasts and graves,
    leaving every absence filled,
    every sorrow lost to dreams,

    it is oddly understandable
    why the weary old, the damaged
    do so calmly come to death.
    —

    Sharon Scholl is professor emerita from Jacksonville University where she taught the western  humanities courses and non-western studies (Africa, Japan).  Her chapbook, Summer’s Child, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. Single poems appear currently in Adanna, Caesura, and Kalyna Language Press.  A musician/composer, she maintains a website that gives away free music to small choirs. She lives in Atlantic beach Fl.