An Expanding Swirl of Light – a poem by Wally Swist

An Expanding Swirl of Light

	—after Jean Sibelius’ Violin Concerto in D Minor, Opus 47



You tell me
that you have gone deep
with the music,
eyes closed,
tears streaming down your cheeks,
after the standing ovation.

Sibelius, the failed violinist,
who wrote a virtuoso violin concerto, in 1902,
for someone other than himself to perform,
in the guise of Baiba Skride,
a Neaman Stradivarius
alternately weeping and singing in her hands,

more than a century later,
her bow moving over the strings
as if she were spinning a silken
music in the air,
as if she found the seam
into which you could slip into

the transcendent, with ease, rinsing you
and rinsing you again
with the heavy fragrance
of honey locust flowers
scenting each gust
of the cooling morning breeze

blowing through the Koussevitsky 
Music Shed, the violinist pausing only for
the orchestral accompaniment,
head held high, poised, 
ready to finish the weaving
of some of Sibelius’s finest

pages of  semiquavers, filling
the space within you
with an expansive swirl of  light,
one that reconnects you to the miraculous,
that may not be able to
restore your memory, but

creates a tacit new one that shines
beyond any shadow of forgetting,
that remains vibrant with
the sweetened tones of your remembering,
the music transforming
itself as the emergence of your healing angel

just hovering there 
over you beside me like an answered prayer.

Wally Swist’s books include Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012), selected by Yusef Komunyakaa for the 2011 Crab Orchard Open Poetry Competition, and A Bird Who Seems to Know Me: Poems Regarding Birds and Nature, winner of the 2018 Ex Ophidia Poetry Prize. Recent essays, poems, and translations have appeared in Asymptote (Taiwan), Chicago Quarterly Review, Commonweal, The Comstock Review, New World Writing, Pensive: A Journal of Global Spirituality & the Arts, Today’s American Catholic, and Poetry London. Shanti Arts published his translation of L’Allegria, Giuseppe Ungaretti’s first iconic book, in August 2023.