She keeps failing to twirl a baton. She knows I’m watching her. She doesn’t look embarrassed. Her apparent composure confounds me. Some move through their lives at ease. She looks about five years old. She doesn’t resent me, a stranger. Or at least she doesn’t show it. Late summer here in our village. Her father sits on a bench. He reads a magazine. I mean he peeks at its pages. He won’t let himself get distracted.
I look at all this in wonder.
What can it be that I lack?
The child spins her shiny baton. It tumbles again to grass. The grass has gotten so pallid! When will this drought ever end? We all need a dream of deliverance. By something far greater than we are. I don’t mean to sound like a mystic. How did that notion arrive? Will I always simply look on? Now the small girl calls out Dad! She has a voice after all. Had I somehow doubted she did? Her father stands, walks near. Then he picks her up and hugs her.
It’s a normal sort of gesture.
Why am I just shy of tears?
Sydney Lea is a Pulitzer finalist in poetry, founder of New England Review, Vermont Poet Laureate (2011-15), and recipient of his state’s highest artistic distinction, the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. He has published two novels (most recently Now Look, 2024), seven volumes of personal essays (most recently, Such Dancing as We Can, 2024), a hybrid mock epic with former Vermont Cartoonist Laureate James Kochalka called Wormboy (2020), and sixteen poetry collections (most recently What Shines 2023). His new and selected poems, Dancing in the Dark, is due in early 2027.