by Sharon Scholl

I want to know it was all real,
that I did not imagine horse carts
lumbering down city streets,
that I was not the only child
who licked cream from milk bottles,
that others read by kerosene lamps
whose clean clothes smelled of Oxydol.

Tell me there is something left
if only in these wisps of memory.
Tell me those lost times, the loved faces
scored upon my brain are not fictitious.
I who live by disconnections
need to know that I am real.

Sharon Scholl, professor emerita from Jacksonville University (FL) where she taught Western Humanities and Non-Western Studies (Africa, Japan).  She has three small volumes of poetry in print: Timescape, All Points Bulletin, Message on a Branch.  A composer and choral director, she has a website with her original music to give away to choirs: freeprintmusic.com