Vox Populi
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Sydney Lea: Poor, Sad Soul
I’d seen that balding woman before, the one I watched as she transferred a few small sacks of groceries from her shopping cart to her Kia Soul, a car I considered too young for her.
The forenoon’s thawing breeze lifted wisps from her head and dropped them, then lifted and dropped them again in what I half-believed was a regular rhythm. Her jeans with holes in their knees looked too young too. I’m ashamed I exerted every ounce of resistance I had not to file her under poor and sad. I failed.
People came and went, their feet making a minor racket on the lot’s grit. I raised my eyes: two crows were fighting the blow above the market; a pigeon, poised on a telephone wire, was framed by a queer, perfectly oval cloud. Against a berm on route 5, a green patch showed as a flawless, sharp-edged square that called to my mind a work by Piet Mondrian.
The shopper stashed a last bag. Was I alone among that motley crowd to wonder how she could function like anybody? She bought, she cooked, she ate, she clearly knew how to drive.
An acned young man in a hoodie sat in a nearby, waiting– for girlfriend? mother? buddy?– in a beater sedan, ear-splitting hip-hop surging out his window. Doja Cat, I knew, because I have teen-aged grandchildren now. The balding woman paused in loading up her Soul, looked over at the surly kid, and did a minimal bump and grind. The boy started to smile, but true to his adolescence, he soon corrected himself, glaring at her briefly and going back to thumbing his phone.
How vile a man I can be! I saw how judgmental my thoughts had been. With what suddenly struck me as a sort of flourish, the woman settled a shock of tulips onto her seat. For all my shallow assessments, she had as much a life as I’ll ever claim.
Maybe she’d try that spray of flowers in several rooms– if she had more than one– to see which one looked a bit brighter for a spray of bright-red blooms.
~~~~
Copyright 2025 Sydney Lea
Sydney Lea served as founding editor of New England Review and was Vermont’s Poet Laureate from 2011-15. He won the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts from the Vermont Arts Council in 2021.
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Yes, it is challenging to be old and even more challenging to have chemotherapy but that is no reason to give up and not enjoy every minute. Ignore the judgment of people, and we who are prone to judge might soon find ourselves in less than favorable circumstances. This is a beautifully written piece of poetic prose and the photo of the tulips is perfect.
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Spot on, Mandy
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Love this one, Sydney. Here’s hoping you’ll respond to the next dancer you encounter with a bump-and-grind of your own! Joan Baez, now in her eighties, says she liberates her “inner slut” each time she hits the dance floor❣️
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Hahahaha. Joan Baez’s inner slut. I think I’ve found the title of my next book.
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I admire this poem and how the poet suggests he might have, at least for an instant, been ready to judge. As an old internist, I would have put my powers of observation to work, so, partway through this poem, she has become my patient. Most likely, she’s on chemotherapy. Then, hoping that’s not the cause for her alopecia, I’d get thyroid tests, autoimmune tests and so forth. I’d tell her how much I admire her grit, ike my old mother—a bumper and grinder to the end. Gosh, what a poem can do. Sydney put me back to work again!
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Brilliant comment, HC. Thank you.
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I went that route, too, only as someone who fairly recently had no hair ( cut it and donated before chemo) I thought of how important it is to buy something bright and happy along with the groceries.
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And while the “old teenager” of a woman was arranging flowers, words were being turned into her portrait for us readers to view and admire.
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The observer and the observed are entwined together.
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The prose of this piece is so finely crafted that it rises to the level of poetry.
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What a fine, fine poem, Syd, kind heart that you are!
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Thanks for your presentation of my essay, Mike! Honored to appear in VP!
Ever,
Syd
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I think of my mother’s last days driving, I would comment “She’s doing it by feel…” as she’d bump into trees on occasion just getting out of our yard. It’s a sad poem indeed, a mirror that also looks outwardly, and there is sweet love here as well Sydney that has us all caught up in it and so much to your credit.
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