Poet of the Month

January: Rebecca Lowe (Wales).
February: Jim Gronvold (USA). 
March: Carolyn Mary Kleefeld (USA).
April: Tozan Alkan (Turkey).
May: Byron Beynon (Wales).
June: Michelle Chung (USA). 
July: Jim Gwyn (USA).
August: Jonathan Taylor (England).
September: Beata Poźniak (USA).
October: Maria Taylor (England).
November: Stanley H. Barkan (USA).
December: John Dotson (USA).

January: Maria Mastrioti (Greece).

February: Gayl Teller (USA).
March: Mike Jenkins (Wales).
April: Cassian Maria Spiridon (Romania).
May: Simon Fletcher (England)
June: Sultan Catto (USA)
July: Vojislav Deric (Australia)
August: K. S. Moore (Ireland)
September: Kristine Doll (USA)
October: Tammy Nuzzo-Morgan (USA)
November: Christopher Norris (Wales)
December: Maria Mazziotti Gillan (USA)

2023: Poets featured as Poet of the Month 

January: Samuel Ezra (Wales)
February: Tôpher Mills (Wales)
March: Rob Cullen (Wales)
April: Mandira Ghosh (India)
May: John Greening (England)
June: Rosy Wood-Bevan (Wales)
July: David Hughes (Wales)

2025: Poets featured as Poet of the Month 
January: Annest Gwilym (Wales)
February: Sam Smith (Wales)
March: Dave Lewis (Wales)
April: Scott Elder (France)
May: Angela Kosta (Italy)
June: Abeer Ameer (Wales)
July: Jenny Mitchell (England)

 

 AUGUST POET OF THE MONTH: 
SYDNEY LEA (USA)

 Sydney Lea (c) 2025 Sydney Lea

A Pulitzer finalist in poetry, Sydney Lea served as founding editor of New England Review and was Vermont’s Poet Laureate from 2011 to 2015.  In 2021, he was presented with his home state’s highest distinction of its kind, The Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. He has published twenty-seven books: two novels, six volumes of personal and three of critical essays, and sixteen poetry collections, most recently What Shines (Four Way Books, NYC, 2023). He has lately published a new book of personal essays, Such Dancing as We Can (The Humble Essayist Press, 2024), and a second novel, Now Look (Downeast Books, 2024).

 

Lea’s work has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, The New Republic, The Nation, and almost all the major American literary quarterlies. His work has been translated into Croatian, Slovenian, Italian and Arabic. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Fulbright Foundations, and has taught at Yale, Wesleyan, Middlebury, Dartmouth,  Eotvos Lorand University (Budapest) ,and Franklin College (Lugano, Switzerland).


What Shines?

Astonishing, this never-ending effort
to have had a happy childhood. Why does it matter
now, why will yourself into all that forgetting?
She may have been a good mother– at least she tried.

Did she? Once again, you’re the one who’s trying.     
You contend you do remember moments that glow:
You picture her standing one day in the snow, her teeth
in a chatter, no doubt, and yet she looked quite cheerful–

or she seemed to be trying. As you are. The teeth at least
were one good feature, radiant to the end.
You were poised at the top of a hill on a Flexible Flyer,
red sled that shone, your Christmas present at nine.

It may have brought you joy. You’re trying to alter
the down-slope rush, to make it shiny too,
to forget the icicles of snot, the raw
fingers, chilblains. Pain. A father was there,

a good man, you’ve always believed, who’s now no more
than a specter, whose presence is no more advantageous
than on that day. Or was it of some avail?
You can’t remember. You honestly can’t remember.

Perhaps you just don’t want to. You’re doing well–
at least you’re trying– with this, your obstinate bid
to winnow the damage and see if there’s anything more
than just the sorrow. Well, there were certain instants.  

You say, I remember stones. You say, I saw
a beach by moonlight. And did those pebbles glint
like stars, as you insist? Are you quite sure
clouds never came to eclipse them? You keep on trying.

There’s that pervasive gleam along the shore.
Then you take a step and suddenly there’s nothing

(c) 2025 Sydney Lea


Heart Failure: a Ghazal

In mind, a world comes to life, a world that cannot be revived except
in mind, the end on its dauntless way, little else remaining to ponder.

What idiocy! I have family, friends, good food, the anti-Procrustean world
of nature, etymologies, music– a boundless network of things to ponder.

But it’s memory that bears down, its images staying intact no matter the years:
first snowfall, death, love, child– all among endless things to ponder.

No point in lamenting the dusk of my life as if it were something uncommon.
It’s just that it’s taken all that life for its end to become a thing to ponder.

I might say that death preoccupied me more in fact when I was much younger.
Still I drove too fast, I drank, I smoked– mere theatre, the end I endlessly pondered.

I’m only one human of billions. The doctor wasn’t theatrical with my news,
just crisp, having other patients and doubtless her own private things without end to ponder.

Yes, to muse on mortality is more about recall than my banal demise.
I’ll lose many people I cherish, of course, but the endless particulars too that I’ve pondered:

Thelonious Monk, some foolish old shoes, a dog’s odd behavior, good books and fragments
of chat, unending skein of sentiment and event... All there to ponder.  

Self-pitying Sydney Lea, accept all this– without resigning, however.
If you aren’t ended yet, then there’s a future, and that will offer plenty to ponder.

(c) 2025 Sydney Lea


Round and Round and Round

I can name most birds by sight
          but I struggle to know them by call,
not least because, I’m told
          by experts appraising such matters,                             
my long-term, burdensome deafness
          can now be dubbed profound.
Yet even without hearing aids–
           the best, I’ve been assured–
I’m plagued today by a song
           that keeps repeating itself.
It repeats itself. Repeats.
           Oh Lord, how it repeats.
Phoebe-Phoebe-Phoebe!

           Phoebe-Phoebe-Phoebe!
I usually love that creature,
            how it twitches its perky tail,
its hovering as it picks
            an insect off the skyscape,
its tidy nest, its feathers’
            subtle colors. So on.
But today that iteration
            of sound outside the window
from where I sit and ponder
            the countless words from which
to choose for the page before me,
            words, I mean, to improve

on the paper’s blankness somehow –
            that ceaseless bird call moves me
almost to scream out loud.
            I know it’s a shameless delusion
to think of writing well
            as suspending the rush of time
but isn’t that the dream,
             the one I chase every day?
The phoebe’s trite recital
             of notes suggests something different:
relentless self-replication.
             I seem to be helpless against it.

But I think of a late farmer neighbor,
how he worked from daylight to dark.
             I liked and admired him both,
but chores kept him spare with chat.
             I recall the answer he’d offer
if I asked him, “How you doin’?”
             He’d show a half-smile, then say,
“Round and round and round.”
             How explain such dedication?
I recall him circling his land
              astride his trail-worn tractor,
its original John Deere green
              by the later years of his life
  so old it had turned to tan.

(c) 2025 Sydney Lea


My Mother’s Bedjacket

Its color soothed me. It might have been called,
if not quite rightly, rosy.                          
Nothing has matched it since I was small .

The fabric must have been something like velvet.
It felt more than merely soft.
Since those days, in fact, I’ve touched nothing like it.

The pillow she used in unsettling darkness
as she lay by my gentle father
shared the smell of that supple garment.

Was its fragrance artificial or rather
the scent of a lovely young woman
before years and liquor conspired to take her?

It seems I still ache for that old aroma.
It hasn’t been replicated,
will never be. How did I climb over

the four-poster’s rails, or did she lift me?
I hope she lifted me.
I’ve resolved the sorrowful rage that eddied

between us too soon for too long a time.
I forgive her, yes: after all,
I had a part in every storm.

With a coarsened will, for decades– well after
that father died and left me
broken– I fought to turn my mother

back to what she could be no more.
I cursed her stomach-churning
breath as I hauled her up from the floor,

as I tried to scream away her roughness,
to shout her red face back to pink:
all futile, given her whiskey-deafness.

But still this longing, no matter how faint,
to climb and lay me down
near that odd old hue and odor and scent.

(c) 2025 Sydney Lea


Suspension

Season of the Strawberry Moon, the Algonquins call it.
The berries ripen in June.
We see them along what’s left of ancient tote roads.
Some say Rose Moon, some say Hot.

We won’t be, but if we were forced to forage,
those shy red baubles wouldn’t start to stifle our hunger.

If solitude can be shared, we share it here
in our cabin, deep in the woods.
Don’t ask where it is.

There are gullible perch in the lake.
Under damp duff in the forest, bright worms for bait.
We own a stable rowboat.

Rain dripped all day from the eaves,
then blue broke through
exactly on time for moon to delete it.

Our crackly portable radio says: fair tomorrow,
hot but pleasant. More good fortune.
What did we do to deserve this?

In a jagged row at our clearing’s edge, wild roses glow
like gemstones splayed on felt,
mere minutes before the darkness yields to moonlight too
and they go wan.

A damselfly kept drying its wings all afternoon
on a wall beneath the eaves.
It lifted just at dusk to hover briefly
over its tiny world,

as we do over ours.

(c) 2025 Sydney Lea


Compensation: The Apple-Pickers

                                                               –in mem. Elizabeth K. Jordan                                                               (1878-1976)

As ever, she steadied the paper
with her left hand, the right one wielding a nub
of charcoal. This time she worked on a sketch
for what would become her painting
of eleventh-hour apple-pickers– no, later,
too late. But she wanted November:

frost on grass, ghost-white,
fragile as silence, against which her figures
would be stationed, the pillow of leaves below
the tree: umber, gray,
subtle shades she rightly considered a challenge.
Everything challenged her,

because (did she know it?)
the brute fact was, she painted poorly.
And thus, her grandchildren all believed it
a marvel, after the sketch
gave way to canvas and oils, that the picture proved brilliant,
as if crossed by magic.

It implied unseen things: for instance,
crows, which showed nowhere in what she produced,  
could still be heard, nearby and raucous,
outside the frame. And we caught
the scent of windfall fruit. Or rather I did,
as I never told my siblings

for fear of being taunted.
All of us loved her– and laughed at her too.
We’d spy on her as she studied the easel
on her sunporch, biting her lip,
shaking her head, then dabbing again at the palette,
lost in thought, no doubt.

May our laughter be forgiven.
We were ignorant, not callous.
Like her, if only once in our lifetimes,
may we be blessed by something
that transports us beyond mere chronological measure,
as she was by her one good painting,

which compensated her
for ongoing griefs: the death of a son
in the flu epidemic, and then soon after
of her husband. The Apple-Pickers
seems to have been her stingy Muse’s gift
not just for her valor, but for her persistence,

for simply putting in time.

(c) 2025 Sydney Lea


Dusk in a Marble Orchard

                                      There always comes a point– if you live long enough
                                     when you no longer feel you belong to your time
                                                                             –Marguerite Duras

I only meant to stop here
to get off the road. Or so I thought.
The dead in this patch all lived in nearby houses

now gone to ground amid dark,
encroaching woods. What doomed their hamlet?
Only the headstones endure. The sun concedes

to a gray that might as well
be fog. So something, I sense, is falling,
falling all over. It’s something more than evening.

It seems the cemetery
is seldom seen by anyone.
I judge by its narrow entry lane, all thistles,

and just two stones of the dozen
marked with artificial flowers,
stained cups that have collected all manner of weather

through seasons or maybe years.
I witness four pale geldings too,
grazing, their heads unaccountably arched over

the wall between the graveyard                                       
and the more exuberant field behind them,
in which I imagine a herd of Jersey cows

until the farmer got old, got done.
Out of nowhere, I recall the reins
and harness slung from a spike in a neighbor’s shed,

never used, just there.
The family had no horse or carriage.
Whoever hung up that leather –already moldy

as death in my distant childhood–
lies somewhere forever forgotten, forgotten
even back then. What can I be looking for,

I wonder, what sort of hope
could anybody muster here?
Or is hope the thing I’m after in this ragged acre?

(c) 2025 Sydney Lea


My Wife’s Back

All naked but for a strap, it traps my gaze
As we paddle: the dear familiar nubs
Of spine-bone punctuating that sun-warmed swath,

The slender muscles that trouble the same sweet surface.
We’ve watched and smiled as green herons flushed
And hopped ahead at every bend, and we’ve looked up

At a redtail tracing open script on a sky
So clear and deep we might believe
It’s autumn, no matter it’s August still. Another fall

Will be on us before we know it. Of course we adore
That commotion of color, but it seems to come
Again as soon as it’s gone away. They all do now.

We’re neither young anymore, to put matters plainly.
My love for you over forrty years
Extends in all directions, but now to your back as we drift

And paddle down the tranquil Connecticut River.
We’ve seen a mink scratch fleas on a mudflat.
We’ve seen an osprey start to dive but seeing us,

Think better of it. Two phoebes wagged on an ash limb.
Your torso is long. I can’t see your legs
But they’re longer, I know. Phoebe, osprey, heron, hawk:

Marvels under Black Mountain, but I am fixed
On your back, indifferent to other wonders:
Bright minnows that flared in the shallows,

the gleam off that poor mink’s coat,
even the fleas in its fur, the various birds
–the lust of creatures just to survive.

But I watch your back. Never have I wished more not to die.

(c) 2025 Sydney Lea