Sydney Lea's Blog, page 2

vacation time

The blog will be on vacation with its author until late August. My vacation is not all leisurely. If you want to see what I will be devoting my efforts to, go to downeastlakes.org. The land trust over which I preside is within sight of closing a deal on the final 22,000 acres of a project that, together with our prior conservation efforts and those of other conservation and government entities abutting us, will protect an area that is the size of Zion and Yosemite put together. That is saying...

Pre-valedictory

This post comprises, by my computation, my third to last monthly column in statewide papers as Vermont Poet Laureate.  As before, I will be taking the summer off from such columns, and my successor will be named in November, this four-year tenure seeming to have gone by, like most things at my age, in a matter of days.
On the 28th of May, I visited the Vermont Arts Council headquarters, where, with a group of peers, the process of choosing the next state poet began. I cannot, of course...

Two New Poems

                           The Owl and I
Once the half-ass cross got burned on our lawn, my mother lit out for the north to have me. My father was stationed in Gadsden, AlabamaPrior to World War II, commander of so-called Colored Troops, And he’d invited a few of his men into the house, you see, A radical thing back then and there in the heart of Jim-Crow Dixie.So my mo...

The Grace of Incorruption

This post is distinctly different from any of its predecessors. In it, I will try to sell you on a book called “The Grace of Incorruption,” written by a great man and a great friend who died in 2010.
When I tell you that the book’s subtitle is “The Selected Essays of Donald Sheehan on Orthodox Faith and Poetics,” you’ll see why I imagine a challenge to my efforts. Not all readers will share even my radical-Protestant Christian vision; still fewer, I’m sure, will share the late author’s Eas...