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Sydney Lea

Sydney Lea, a former Pulitzer finalist, was awarded Vermont’s Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts in 2021.

Poetry

A Dream of Suffering

                                     . . . in such strengthOf usurpation, when the light of senseGoes out, but with a flash that has revealed...
February 13, 2023
Poetry

Shabbos goy

The early palaver of nestling crows Outside my window in the white pine tree Calls back a childhood in which such ruckus Seemed prelude to possibility....
July 17, 2020
Poetry

Psalmic

I wake up to moon and stars still gleaming in the predawn sky, and think, who cares about someone else’s inscrutable dream? I’ll insist, like everybody,...
March 9, 2020
Poetry

Junior scholar

Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of         the least of these, you did for me.                                                         —Matt. 25:40–45...
May 9, 2019
Poetry

Through a window

I read a poem each Sunday Our pastor calls this Ministryof Verse I try to find a poem not just she but anyone...
April 1, 2015
Poetry

Gone to grace

Before Malcolm’s funeral got started,I stood talking with John the blacksmith, who told meHe’d been spending some pretty hard hoursWith a pair of two-year-old Friesian mares...
September 17, 2013
Poetry

Kansas

We spend our years as a tale that is told.                              —Ps. 90...
December 11, 2012
Poetry

The pastor

I have just one person left on earth who’s beenMy friend through grade school, high school, church, and sports, The pastor says. Meanwhile the winter rain...
June 27, 2012
Poetry

Transfigurations

 —Bow River, Alberta The rowdy gulls—derisive creatures,their yammer an instantaneous flash point of angerfor you. Escaped, your mammoth trout, for which...
November 8, 2011
Poetry

Eye on the sparrow

                                 —for Bruce RichardsTiny, almost an anti-weight,if it blew off my palm in the wind I might not even notice....
May 17, 2010

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Poetry

Grace

He awakens on February first, stunned again by that oddwonder: how quickly old has come. Of course if his will were done...
February 9, 2009
Poetry

Dispute with Thomas Hardy

                        The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing                        Alive enough to have the strength to die....
May 19, 2008
Poetry

Seeing the Word

Isaiah saw the Word?I look up from Writ and am at first just—interested.How to see something spoken?And yet one needs to think,...
May 1, 2006
Poetry

Crutch

Politics, our children,     Some ball team—ordinaryPalaver among old friends     At a B-plus restaurant,Till between the soups and the blood-...
June 13, 2005
Poetry

Barnet Knoll Brook

      —in a time of warHere’s what’s to be read, or part of it,in mud by the brook after last night’s storm—storm that scrawled itself on sky...
November 1, 2004
Poetry

Transport

After the tourist’s two blue insomniac nights,patrols of all that had been lost, botched, or sweetbut severed, during the Albinoni he went off,...
March 8, 2004

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