by Juliane McAdam
Scheherazade, fabled storyteller of Arabian Nights,
under sentence of death, told stories with no endings.
Endless new beginnings, night after night,
kept her alive.
But stories, for all of us, are as essential
to living as breathing. Our lives unfold
like narratives, with beginnings, middles, ends.
Like Scheherazade, we are all under sentence of death,
but in telling our stories, we live.
***
Juliane McAdam is a California native who grew up in the stark beauty of the Mojave Desert. She spent the last 27 years of a 40-year teaching career teaching English and Spanish to middle school students in Los Angeles, writing poems with them. Now retired and living near Morro Bay on California’s beautiful Central Coast, she enjoys walks, playing piano, and writing poems to record observations and memories.