I love to put the stars to bed like family.
Usually, an early morning in the late dark
when no clouds hover between the lights.
At the zenith, the near future, stars
of next month’s primetime evening hours.
The stars who’ve had all night in our sky
tuck into the western horizon. I nod
a drowsy goodnight as they’re off
to rise in the dusk of another’s east,
where someone may or may not wonder
about yesterday’s dawn as he, she, they
bid sayonara to the sun. This close star
always setting and starting the day
on opposite sides as we continue to spin
in orbit, and I close my eyes to sleep.
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Guy Reed won the 2022 Littoral Press poetry prize and is author of Second Innocence (Luchador Press), The Effort To Hold Light (Finishing Line Press), and co-author, with Cheryl A. Rice, of Until The Words Came (Post Traumatic Press). His poems and essays have been published in journals both online and in print. He’s a graduate of The American Academy of Dramatic Arts. From Minnesota, Guy now resides in the Catskills Mountains. <guyedwinreed.com>
poet Guy Reed on poet Donald Lev
Donald Lev stayed up late. Holdover practice from his cab driving days I imagine.
He would write at the kitchen table, listen to the BBC on NPR and go to bed in the morning.
I think this practice came about more so after his wife, poet, Enid Dame died and he was alone. I often imagined his late nights. He told me once in an interview, that he once was driving a car to California, and it had broken down in West Texas and he had to spend the night while it was repaired. He looked up and had never seen the sky so filled with stars. He thought, I want to be a part of all that. And that is what inspired him to be a writer.
I like to be up early and look at the stars myself. One morning I thought of Donald Lev doing the same thing only after being up all night. It’s not quite in Donald’s voice, but the poem is after his kind of style.
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Donald Lev was a major poetic voice in New York City in the 1960s and in the Hudson Valley from the 1970s until his death in 2018. Born in 1936, he attended Hunter College; worked in the newspaper wire rooms of The New York Daily News and the New York Times; drove a cab, along with writing poetry (first published in 1958) for The Village Voice and operating the Home Planet Bookshop on the Lower East Side. His brief film acting career was his portrayal of “The Poet” in Robert Downey Sr.’s 1969 film, Putney Swope in which he wrote his own lines. His last decades (in the Hudson Valley) were consumed with writing numerous volumes of poetry and publishing the literary tabloid, Home Planet News, which he and his late wife, poet Enid Dame founded in 1979.
Lightwood 