Sean Reagan across three issues
Sean Reagan is a poet and writer associated with western Massachusetts. Biographical records describe his work in journals including Rattle, Yankee Magazine, Chiron Review, and Modern Haiku, and note an earlier career in criminal law.
Three historical issues record his work. Issue 10 preserves the title “Sitting Out Front With Sophia.” Issue 13 preserves “Salt” and “Resisting amnesia” in full. Issue 33 records “Baking Bread in Winter.” Across these titles and surviving poems, weather, domestic absence, faith, deer, snow, wind, pines, love, and sudden moments of attention recur.
Salt
Will you be home soon? I wonder
in all this wind and rain beginning.
I know that you are happy but I miss you.
Sometimes, when you are gone, I recall
the melodies of favorite songs
but don’t sing them. My heart turns
to salt in its leathery shell and the many names
of God light candles behind my teeth.
Love is not loyalty, nor joy, nor lust only. As high up
in crowns of windblown pine, ants work, heedless.
Resisting amnesia
This morning a herd of deer passed slow
and graceful over the late winter snow.
No sun, no wind. I knelt on the upper ridge
to see. Our lives resist flowering. But sometimes,
no warning, there is a momentary clarifying bloom.
Other recorded poems
Issue 10 records “Sitting Out Front With Sophia,” and Issue 33 records “Baking Bread in Winter.” Their poem texts are absent from the surviving pages, so the archive preserves their titles and authorship without enough text for close reading.
Later record
elsewhere publishes later work by Reagan and identifies him as a writer and teacher on a small farm in western Massachusetts. The Contemporary Lawyer Poets archive records his earlier legal career and poetry publications.