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Author: Wally Swist

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    L’Allegria: Seven translations of Ungaretti

    • Wally Swist
    • 30 August 2021
    1 Comment

    Stopped at two stones, I languish beneath this vault tarnished with heaven. The tangle of these paths are in possession of my blindness. Nothing is more squalid than my monotony.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Learn to live with a mountain between us

    • Wally Swist
    • 27 October 2020

    We might have learned that we can no longer feed on the leaves at the tops of the crowns, but need to bend our long necks, which we carry on our small body and relatively short legs, and we have retrained ourselves to consume the leaves on the lower limbs.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The seamless glass

    • Wally Swist
    • 09 June 2020
    1 Comment

    Of the inaudible seamless glass the reflections mirror, pellucid and far — they refract the stillness of the rocks whose silhouettes darken among the chiaroscuro of faces onshore. The mirrored reflections reflect the silence of sky, accompanying the sliding clouds that skate across the absolute clarity.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    After Rilke: Visitation of the Virgin

    • Wally Swist
    • 01 July 2019
    4 Comments

    Windswept Judean hills. Not by the sheer vista below could her abundance ever be measured; striding, with each step she believed no one could transcend the largesse she carried.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The wake

    • Wally Swist
    • 25 March 2019
    4 Comments

    A child approaches the casket, reaches within to try to lift my folded hands, to make sure, as she tells her mother later, that I am not just sleeping.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Walt Whitman on Donald Trump

    • Wally Swist
    • 03 September 2018
    5 Comments

    Oh, you snake oil selling provocateur, you faux gilded imposter, selling authoritarianism for American democracy; may you choke on your own phlegm-filled speeches, your conspiratorial rants, your endless quiver of lies, whose equivocal insults you brandish and shoot like arrows at those whose integrity you should quaver beneath.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Cloud meditations

    • Wally Swist
    • 02 October 2017
    2 Comments

    Even when I was a child, I had a distinct intuition that I had lived previous lives in which I was trying to enlighten others around me. I find most people are not receptive.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Finding my grandfather

    • Wally Swist
    • 29 May 2017
    2 Comments

    There is the photograph of my father's father in military uniform, an Austrian, serving in the Polish cavalry in WWI, standing ramrod straight. It is he whom I think of when I find myself dowsing my genome for answers regarding my origin, the deep pull that draws me to the late symphonies of Mozart, Rilke's angelic mysticism, and, as a child, to Krapfen and Apfelstrudel ... That grandfather died shortly after returning to his farm from the results of having been a victim of a mustard gas attack in the war.

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