Selected poems
Dream, on a morning in the sacred month of October
For Father Gabriel Rochelle
In the bardo,
huddled and waiting with others
after our life reviews,
each making ready for
our atonement, you entered
the vestibule to our right
bearing a large wooden cross.
Wordlessly, you spoke to me
to rise, and to follow; whereupon,
we walked into yet
another room — an anteroom,
which led outward, back into
the world, not as we know it, but
yet another world. This is when
the cross came apart
through your own ingenuity, and
broke cleanly through the middle,
lengthwise, to become two crosses,
of which you handed one
half for me to carry, and the other
half you lifted to bear
on your shoulder. Upon awaking,
I am now both cleansed
and challenged, given direction but
needing to reset my compass,
buoyed up but aware of the weight
of the new I will need to carry, as
I find my way from the vivid depths
of the dream on a morning
in the sacred month of October, as I
emerge toward a shimmering
of light breaking through the clouds.
The sunflowers
Their large heads loomed above me,
arrayed with their bright yellow petals.
Row after row of them arranged
in lines to the right side of the house
and adjacent to the garage in the back.
At nine, I looked up at their creaking
stalks on autumn days on my way to
and from school, and looked down
on their ranks from the glassed-in
porch of the second floor railroad flat
my father rented after my mother's
death. I was overcome by their yellow
brilliance and the size of their corollas,
which exceeded the diameter
of a human head. Our landlords were
an elderly Albanian couple who moved
slowly and spoke incoherently, as my
Polish father did, in broken English,
their red and white oilskin tablecloth
always graced with a small white bowl
of sunflower seeds for the enormous
caged parrot, who could swear in
impeccably explicit language. The bird
was menacing but obedient to its owners.
Although any visitor was treated
as a home invader. He would begin
by hissing, then moved into a barrage
of curses. The Albanians winnowed
the seeds from their crop after
deadheading the flowers, their kitchen
table having become a staging area
for putting up kernels. After the harvest,
deep in October, the plots
where the sunflowers loomed became
desolate with dried stalks the wind
blew through, with a sound whose tone
underscored the sereness of autumn.
I looked at the stark rows from
the glassed-in porch upstairs, where
I had been stung by a wasp, which made
my finger throb as if it had been hit
by a hammer, but the memory
of the glory of the sunflowers in bloom
continued to fill me, as do the rays
of sunlight that shone into the rooms
of that tawdry railroad flat, bearing its
curled and cracked linoleum, with
a sadness that still pervades me when
I think of awakening there, and hearing
the winds of loss blowing every morning.
What we ever really need to know
All we need to know
is that Magdalene, Mary, the mother
of James, and Salome came
in the darkness before morning to
His tomb to anoint the body with
spices and oils. That alone
is beautiful. Just the thought of
anointing the dead body of Jesus
makes us pause with astonishment —
His body battered and bloodied,
then crucified, the five wounds
from the nails in His hands and feet,
the lance mark near His heart.
All we need to know
is that Joseph of Arimathea removed
Jesus from the cross, wrapped
His body in linen, and placed it in
a tomb, which was cut into rock,
like a cave, that a stone, weighing
possibly as much as two tons, was
lifted into the opening, on grooves,
upon which it could be slid into
place, only by several strong men.
All we need to know
is that Magdalene, Mary, the mother
of James, and Salome found the stone
rolled away, the body of Jesus gone,
an empty pile of bloody linens
in which the body had lain.
All we need to know
is that they were all startled into tears
by the depth of their amazement,
that they probably placed their baskets
of oils and spices on the rocky ground,
that they embraced each other,
that they knew what they knew,
that there was a plenitude and
a providence in the joy of their knowing.
All we need to know
is that as the sun rose out of the darkness
the light entered the cave in the rock,
that as the sun had risen,
so had Christ, that the women could
be seen dancing, their arms raised,
crying out, Hallelujah, that as they
danced and sang, what had transpired
from the spiritual alchemy in that cave
was such that His rising up was also
our ascension if we only were so bold
to believe in such a revolutionary act
as our own hearts opening in resurrection
within us, resolutely without question,
opening to Christ consciousness, opening
to I art thou, to such an inviolate
unspoken mystery, the whirling
cosmos inside me and you, to awaken to
what is beatific, as was the light
Magdalene, Mary, the mother of James,
and Salome danced in, which
is really all that we ever need to know.
Walt Whitman on Donald Trump
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 instead of belittling.
You choose to ruin and impede
instead of build and facilitate. Your
brand of hatred scars
and lacerates, leaving a barren swath
in its wake. You've long ago made
a deal with the devil, and even he has
stepped aside from your burning
wrath and vehemence.
May the best in us topple you
and the ugliness of your kind, may we
persevere in preserving our largesse
and swamp you in the imbecility
of your own making, your smallness
of character, or lack thereof entirely;
the soulless fluke that you are, whose
odious turpitude rages
in the monstrous wake you leave
for the history you will never be able to
rewrite, for the dark legacy
you will come to be known for,
and the spiritual insolvency with which
you have defrauded all of the people.
May the echoes of your offensive
and irritating pseudo-flamboyance ring
in your own ears. May your defiant
windup toy impressions
of how and what eloquent presidents
walk and talk like
strike you down in your spitefulness.
May you crawl like the worm that
you are. May we reinhabit the earth.
Wally Swist's books include Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love, The Daodejing: A New Interpretation, with David Breeden and Steven Schroeder, and Candling the Eggs. His forthcoming books are The Map of Eternity, Singing for Nothing: Selected Nonfiction as Literary Memoir, and On Beauty: Essays, Reviews, Fiction, and Plays.