Sydney Lea Q&A with audience, Bates College, November 17, 2011
Sydney Lea answers audience questions following his reading at Bates College, November 17, 2011.
closebits
The Feud
I don’t know your stories. This one here is the meanest one I’ve got or ever hope to. Less than a year ago. Last of November, but hot by God! I saw the Walker gang, lugging a little buck. (A sandwich size. It would be. That bunch doesn’t have the patience. I’d passed up […]
Sydney Lea
Sydney Lea is Vermont’s Poet Laureate. Founding editor of New England Review, he has published ten books of poems, a novel, a selection of literary essays, and three volumes of naturalist nonfiction.
Child, counting
Wind keeps counting sandgrains on shifting dunes. He cannot count me. Summer keeps counting stars in clear night skies. He cannot count me. Storm keeps counting rain pellets in her heart. She cannot count me. Light keeps counting things. She won’t ever stop. She cannot count me. Death keeps counting hordes of […]
Clean out the house
Clean out the house for springtime. Sweep the floor in patience and in conscientiousness. Let in the wind that’s hammering at the door. Who knows, some day we’ll hammer out a cure for cruelty, corruption, cowardice, clean out the house for springtime, sweep the floor. create a pattern, not caricature of natural justice, […]
Lucky I draw my breath
Lucky I draw my breath from everywhere. I draw it, draw upon it, give it back. The wind calls and I love it. Meet me there. Breath glows and glories through me as I bear these words on wind. I know. I have the knack. Lucky I draw my breath from everywhere. The […]
Shalom: Sixth blessing
The unborn and the dead gather in the head. The dead and the unborn fill plenty’s horn giving and forgiving life for the living.
The blue butterfly
On my Jew’s hand, born out of ghettos and shtetls, raised from unmarked graves of my obliterated people in Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, on my hand mothered by a refugee’s daughter, first opened in blitzed London, grown big through post-war years safe in suburban England, on my pink, educated, ironical left hand […]