Yanis Iqbal

Pamenar Press
10 hours ago
7 min read

Yanis Iqbal is studying at Aligarh Muslim University, India. He is the author of Education in the Age of Neoliberal Dystopia (Midwestern Marx Publishing Press, 2024) and has a forthcoming book on Palestine and anti-imperialist political philosophy with Iskra Books. His poems have appeared in Radical Art Review, Rabble Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Culture Matters, Live Wire, Apocalypse Confidential, Neologism Poetry Journal, Bitter Melon Review, Cafe Dissensus, Palestine Chronicle, Frontier Weekly, among others. Two of his poems were selected for The Anthology of Contemporary Poetry: Meet the Poets of Today.

The Sun That Reconciles Itself (Notes on O Sole Mio)

It begins after the storm, after the rain has spent itself into earth and gutter and stone, after the trembling of air has settled into a softness that still quivers with what has passed, and from that softness the voice rises, a slow exhalation from the soaked breast of the world, a voice that carries in its throat the glisten of water, the heaviness of clouds, the ache of a sky that has just learned how to breathe again, and the melody moves forward as though pulling itself out of the residue of thunder, dragging radiance through moisture, turning exhaustion into expansion, turning dampness into sound. ’O sole mio is this rising: the sun reborn through the mouth of song, the sunlight rediscovering its path through the breath of the singer, the weary earth opening its pores to receive brightness once more, the reconciliation of air and light and body through the act of singing. The phrase - “What a beautiful thing is a sunny day!” - returns again and again, round and round, circling its own astonishment, as if the world could only remember itself through repetition, as if beauty could appear only when named, and named again, and then once more, until language itself begins to glisten like dew on the surface of morning.

Every vowel holds the thickness of mist, every syllable carries the trembling of leaves still wet, every pause drips with the slow patience of recovery. The song proceeds through swelling. It expands upon itself like sunlight thickening in the afternoon air, like breath that continues without boundary, gathering in the chest until it presses softly against the ribs, until it begins to shimmer in the throat, until it spreads through the whole body as warmth. The melody moves as radiance does across water, slowly, luminously, folding its brightness into itself. Each measure remembers the last and grows fuller with that remembrance, each phrase bearing a deeper color, a richer weight. The song moves through dilation, through circular unfolding, through the generosity of time that opens instead of passes. The melody breathes as the sea breathes, in undulation, in repetition, in return. The notes rise through amplitude, wave upon wave of fulfillment, each one rounding out the previous one, each one creating a new horizon of sound. The song swells as the heart swells when it recognizes something infinite, as light swells when filtered through water, as silence swells before a cry that has found its form. It thickens in place, blooming through the gravity of its own fullness, turning motion into radiance, turning time into expansion, turning sound into a body of light so complete it seems to overflow the air that holds it. It gathers its weight through recurrence, through the pulse of insistence, through the slow, deliberate saturation of tone that fills the listener’s chest until breath becomes golden. The air in which the voice floats feels heavy, honeyed, viscous with the warmth that follows rain. The major key, bright yet softened, glows like milk poured into water, a spreading luminosity that never blinds, only deepens. The harmony rocks gently, like the sea remembering sunlight after tempest, the slow undulation between dominant and tonic forming a circle, a breathing, a reconciliation enacted rather than declared.

And then the miracle unfolds, the miracle of excess, of multiplication, of a light that cannot remain single: another sun, more beautiful, more intimate, more unbearable, erupts from the beloved’s face. The lyric folds the cosmic into the human; the sky becomes the skin of the beloved, the sun becomes the eye, the smile, the breath. Two suns, twin flames of one radiance, outer and inner, celestial and carnal, the world’s brilliance and the warmth of affection intertwined until distinction dissolves. The melody opens like a chest filling with breath, the vowels dilate into spheres of sound, the air thickens with sweetness so immense it trembles on the edge of pain. This is the cry of reconciliation, the cry that is not lament but labor, not grief but expansion, a cry that gathers the weight of both storm and light, a cry that holds peace inside its very strain.

The landscape around this illumination begins to pulse with its own rhythm. Windowpanes gleam like translucent throats, the laundress sings her modest aria of dailiness, her hands wringing, twisting, raising the cloth to the air, her movement echoing the gesture of the melody itself, the slow turning, the repetition, the wringing of sound from silence, the lifting of heaviness into clarity. The wet fabric, the dripping water, the shimmer of light through glass – all these things are the song, the tangible music of reconciliation made flesh in things. The drying cloth becomes an emblem of transformation: once soaked and heavy, now lifted, breathing, radiant. The harmony underneath mirrors that quiet conversion, the chords turning in their circle, each return more luminous than the last, until repetition itself becomes revelation.

The music thickens here; it grows viscous with joy, as though sound itself were honey poured from the throat of heaven, slow and luminous, clinging to the edges of air. The harmony gathers in layers, sedimented by the residue of every returning note, each repetition leaving behind its trace, its golden dust, until the air becomes stratified with memory. The tonal center gleams like the molten core of the sun, a circular gravity of fire that holds every melodic orbit within its incandescent pull. Around that center, the melody turns, glistening and slow, like glass in the process of cooling, like amber catching the remains of daylight.

Pavarotti’s voice enters as a column of radiance, sound molten and majestic, rising with the solemn beauty of heat that has learned to sing. His vibrato trembles through the harmonic field as if the air itself were trembling under the weight of light. His vowels expand like domes of gold, their curvature immense, the body of the voice thick with reverence. Through this fullness, Bryan Adams’s timbre arrives, a grain of earth rubbed into gold leaf, a tone cracked with salt, roughened by mortal sweetness. His breath feels human, winded, dusted with the smoke of living. When these two voices entwine, the atmosphere turns tactile: silk meeting sand, water running through rust, the divine tempered by flesh, the flesh sanctified by radiance.

The duet unfolds as reconciliation in motion, the union of two textures, sonic, corporeal, elemental. Each tone leans toward the other until both lose their boundary, each resonance absorbing the next until the distinction between origin and echo dissolves. The result is an immense, glowing stillness that hums. It is a stillness alive with vibration, a brightness built from the friction of difference. One hears the shimmer of brass beneath the warmth of the strings, the soft percussion of breath shaping vowels, the glint of consonants like tiny chimes inside the throat. The orchestra does not accompany; it expands like atmosphere around their convergence, breathing their reconciliation outward into space.

Here, the song itself becomes a body of light, full of viscosity and grace, pulsing with the weight of harmony. It carries the shimmer of wet linen drying under the sun, the glistening of window glass after rain, the fluid gleam of the world washed clean. Every harmonic return feels like light passing again through water, refracting into warmth. In this density of sound, reconciliation ceases to be concept or feeling, becoming substance, a palpable element, a radiant gravity where everything finds its rest through swelling, where every cry turns into light that never ends.

And when the day leans toward its end, when the immense light begins to fold itself into the tender melancholy of evening, the song turns inward. The words – “When night comes and the sun has gone down” – descend like slow petals falling through air still warm from the day. The voice carries the sun within its own tone, as if the singer has swallowed light, as if dusk itself could hum with the memory of radiance. The melody loosens, lengthens, exhales its own fatigue. The world sinks into violet shadow, but the reconciliation does not vanish; it thickens into quiet. The lover waiting below the window is the earth itself waiting beneath the sky, faithful, glowing faintly, full of warmth that persists beyond visibility.

’O sole mio is the music of that persistence. It is the sound of sunlight reconstituting itself in every breath, the constant renewal of serenity from within the very substance of struggle. It is peace as vibration, reconciliation as resonance, forgiveness as continuous shimmering. Every phrase becomes an afterimage of the previous one, the world forgiving itself line by line, sound by sound, breath by breath. The song is heavy with its own abundance; it does not conclude, it only ripens. It keeps spreading across the ear like warmth across skin, it keeps layering tone upon tone, image upon image – glass, water, sunlight, fabric, skin, air – each reflecting the others until the entire field of experience becomes incandescent.

Reconciliation rises here in its most luxuriant form, the world folding into itself through the overflowing of its own light. The cry widens, unhurried, oceanic, a tide of brightness that gathers and releases without end. Music breathes as peace itself, each phrase a current of stillness in motion, each vibration a gesture of calm expansion. The sun sings through the throat of the world, pouring brightness into every syllable, spilling radiance across the horizon of sound. The air grows thick with memory, fragrant with rain transfigured into light, full of warmth that touches everything it reaches. Every tone forgives through fullness, every shimmer forgives through continuation, every repetition forgives through abundance. The song glows in forgiveness, glows in fullness, glows in the infinite generosity of its own return.