crawling on lichens
between monuments in stone
a slender black snake
leads me to the pathway’s end—
quiet graveyard, loud spirits
Untitled photograph of graveyard in Czechia
by Vladimir Mokry (2 September 2014)
(Image cropped, modified, and reproduced here
under Creative Commons public
domain license.)
is a recently retired (2015) full-time humanities professor at Lansing Community College and currently a visiting faculty member in the Department of Religious Studies at Michigan State University where he has taught part-time since 2008. In 2009, he was selected as the guest editor for a special edition on the Asian humanities for the Journal of Interdisciplinary Humanities. Until recently, he regularly participated as a visiting scholar for the Japan Center for Michigan Universities.
Professor Sjoquist has traveled extensively to Asian countries including Turkey, Mongolia, China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and Japan. He is the author of Mii-dera: The Intersection of Buddhism and Culture in Japan (Kendall Hunt Publishing, 2010), as well as articles published on a variety of topics including the World Civilizations course in the humanities curriculum, Japanese Buddhist art, and U.S. popular culture.
