Sydney Lea

Two Poems
July 26, 2025 Lea Sydney

Old Pine, Old Friend

 

Late afternoon, crows still at gossip
in the backyard’s pecker-scarred pine.
The tree, having sheltered squirrels and birds
for decades, will have to go down.

 

My oldest friend is going down:
addledness and illness.
We all recall him as tough as leather–
and as the most loyal among us.

 

I’m not tough myself– not enough anyway
to chop that tree on my own.
That this should embarrass me is absurd,
but no matter. It just feels wrong.

 

Suddenly everything seems wrong,
No surprise. We live and die.
What else to expect past three score and ten?
But I once could have felled that pine.

 

I’d have slipped on steel-toed boots,
a hardhat, my ragged Kevlar chaps.
I’d have checked that the house would be clear.
I’d trim off boughs to lay in a stack

 

for a bonfire. I hear the voices
of our children’s children. Their youth. Their mirth.
The saw would have whined a while.
Then that thud. That thud that shakes the earth.

 

 

 

Perspective

 

The morning world looks pale as old flannel,
and from here inside appears dead silent.
I’m not sure why this should feel like a gift.
It rouses my inner paganism,
if that’s in fact the word I’m looking for.
The stove keeps us warm right through the winter,
even the windows in some small measure,
and so when a flake of snow drifts sidelong
against the glass it dies in the instant.

 

A pan with ashes to dump in my hand,
I stand unmoving. It feels like a rite.
Outdoors, caught short by the cold, our crab tree
shows fruit that didn’t get time to ripen.
I could forge a metaphor if I chose,
memento mori or some kindred thing,
but I balk at that. It feels too easy.
Just past our ridge lies the long wide river.
Under ice, it rolls right on as ever.

A Pulitzer finalist in poetry, Sydney Lea founded New England Review, was Vermont’s Poet Laureate, and received his state’s highest artistic distinction, the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. He has published two novels (most recently Now Look), eight volumes of personal essays (most recently, Such Dancing as We Can), and sixteen poetry collections (most recently What Shines)His new and selected poems is due in 2026.