Pascal had it right: the raw night’s
a riptide; oceans of emptiness yawn
in its wake. On the thermostat screen,
black tarp punctured by stars, silent.
How to love a world without end?
When my little sister tossed in bed
one summer dreading eternity,
my mother sat up with her reading
“In my Father’s house are many mansions,”
and “I go to prepare a place for you,”
words rising on air currents, circling
the room until the walls assumed
their familiar shape. Then we slept
in the shelter of her voice.
Even now when I hear her steady
cadence, the sky seems proportioned,
measured like the firmament, like
our wallpaper’s pattern of big flat roses,
our chest of four drawers, night light
glowing staunchly in the dark.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 25, Issue 1.
Diane Scholl is Professor Emerita of English at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, where she taught American and modern British literature, as well as “The Writer’s Voice.” Her poems have been published in Cider Press Review, Last Stanza Poetry Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, among other places. In 2019 her chapbook, Salt, was published by Seven Kitchens Press. Growing up in a Norwegian-American family in Brooklyn, New York, she learned to love the varied cultural roots of her neighborhood, as well as summers in the Hudson Valley, the scene of her poem “Under the Night Sky.”
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