My Early Morning Hours
by Wally Swist
The ordinary pages passed us rapidly,
the uneventful days, those stalwart hours
eclipsing the wealth of all we miss, times
between you throwing your glasses across
the room and what’s sunlit about aides
braiding your hair into pigtails after
breakfast. There is a glide about it,
an ease instead of a fever rhythm, you
savoring each piece of fruit I feed you
by hand this morning opposed to you being
obdurate and keeping your mouth closed,
your brain malfunctioning, synapses
misfiring, crossed, not ill-meaning,
just at cross purpose, intent misunderstood,
reversed. However, today, we’ve
been awarded one of a hundred pieces
of the cake of summer, swallows flocking
outside the large windows of the dining area,
as I show you paintings and photographs
of Mount Ascutney, one of your favorite
mountains, from A Place of Beauty,
about the Cornish Colony, featuring
Maxfield Parish and Saint Gaudens.
You’ve relaxed into pliant happiness,
both of us at agreement with acceptance
of what is, with no worries of what
will be. I give you my early morning
hours. I bend time to love.
Wally Swist
Wally Swist’s new books include Aperture (Kelsay Books), poems regarding caregiving his spouse through Alzheimer’s, and If You’re the Dreamer, I’m the Dream: Selected Translations from Rilke’s Book of Hours (Finishing Line Press). Poems, essays, and translations have appeared in Chicago Quarterly Review, Commonweal, Healing Muse, Montreal Review, North American Review, Pensive, Poetry London, Rattle, Upstreet and Your Impossible Voice. Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012) was selected by Yuseff Komunyakaa as co-winner of the 2011 Crab Orchard Open Poetry Competition. He was also the winner of the Ex Ophidia Press Poetry Prize in 2018 for A Bird Who Seems to Know Me. Wild Rose Bush: The Life of Mary and Other Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke was selected as an honorable mention in the 2025 Stephen Mitchell Prize for Excellence in Translation sponsored by Green Linden Press.