Vox Populi
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Sydney Lea: Before the Operation
The surgeon assures my wife and me:
“a little scrape, then zip! Home-free.”
How did age come on with so little warning?
I woke up in tears early this morning,
then put on an album by the great Art Blakey.
I needed distraction from the night’s dream of Bobby,
sweet friend killed in ‘Nam back too many years.
I wept to have dreamt that young man in tears.
I wanted diversion too from the knife
and this ceaseless mending at my stage of life.
Red squirrels sack our bird-feeder outside,
there’s untimely snow, wild creatures will die,
so my sudden change of perspective is baffling.
Even the terrorist bluejays’ gratings
seem to blend with an ambient, general song,
including spring jingles of ice on the pond.
I’m ashamed I used genius as mere distraction:
“Indestructible”– Art Blakey’s album.
Our trusty phoebe shores up her annual
nest in the eaves to insist that it’s April.
Resolute, she’ll weather the snow.
I mean to survive the scalpel too.
But we won’t let the woodstove’s flame go down.
I’ll want some warmth when I get back home.
~~~~
Copyright 2025 Sydney Lea
SYDNEY LEA was Poet Laureate of Vermont from 2011-2015. In 2021, He received Vermont’s highest artistic distinction, The Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. Lea’s sixteenth collection of poems, What Shines, was published in late 2023.
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I marvel at this poem and its near-rhyming couplets. Bravo, Syd!!!! Sending you healing energy.
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Thank you so much for this, Sydney, especially when it’s so easy to forget how beautiful the world is in the midst of so much terror. It’s son that saves us whether it be poetry, jazz, or birdsong.
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I’m thinking that Art Blakey would forgive – even welcome – his place in this poem!
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I’m sure he’d be honored!
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I’ve long admired Syd–for his loyalty to family and friends, for his trust in his relationship to the natural world, and for the heart-felt poems like this one that so naturally arise (even in rhymed couplets) from the interdependence of family, friends, blue jays and ice on the pond.
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Thanks, Bob! I admire Syd as well.
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The phoebes seem to be our home protectors. A different one for each house as Tashi and I walk the neighborhood. This morning, my daily meditation was not tranquil, not quite able to let go, another operation looms, supposedly going home the same day. This morning, something unsettling about my meditation altar, small jar I used to relocate a brown widow spider, then mind jumps to prayer flags outside, faded but still gently waving in the gray overcast morning. Monkey mind perusing science fiction stories I read when a teen. I wonder how those stories have changed in my mind over time? Something that happens frequently with Vox Populi, is an exquisite poem sends pieces of my mind shattering in all directions and I am obliged to examine each fragment as I attempt to gather them back into some kind of whole.
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Thanks, Barb!
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I was delighted to learn that “geezer” in the UK means just a quirky person, not necessarily old. So, for this superb poem, thank you, and may you enjoy geezerhood, as I am, some of the time….:)
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Thanks, David.
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Dear Syd — take kind care, be & live & write & read & continue to heal well!
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A poem that leans through one of aging’s sharp corners, yet returns home.
Oh, those phoebes and critters of the yard. Wild guests for re-opened eyes. My favorite bird is a jaunty blue jay. To call them the terrorists instead of cardinals, puts Lea on the wrongside of the red/blue avian divide. haha
If we must become geezers, let us be like Sidney Lea, forever young geezers.
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