Rumination
The shadows of the roadside trees
broaden in the late September morning,
cloud shapes lingering over
Monument Mountain disappear,
light wind stirs the hedge
that borders the rail of the veranda
to further deepen the quiet.
Cloud-watching, you say, “Look,
how they move apart ever so slowly,”
gesticulating with a hand
to the bands of cirrus that
only drift farther across the light blue sky,
resembling ocean waves
imprinted upon a shore
of imagination. Things evolve
in constant disappearance:
the contrail above the mountain,
the small plane’s engine droning
into far distance, your memory now
from one moment to the next,
like silence filling the descending scale
of our lives where music was once heard
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, Healing Muse: Center for Bioethics & Humanities La Piccioletta Barca (U.K.), Pensive: A Journal of Global Spirituality & the Arts, Tipton Poetry Review, Poetry London, and Your Impossible Voice. Shanti Arts published his translation of L’Allegria, Giuseppe Ungaretti’s first iconic book, in August 2023. He will be featured writer in the Spring 2025 issue of Ezra: An Online Journal of Translation that will highlight several of his translations from the Spanish of Roberto Juarroz.
Finishing Line Press will be publishing his book, If You’re the Dreamer, I’m the Dream: Selected Translations from The Book of Hours, in 2025.
Amethyst Review 