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Frost Land On the small balcony with purple morning glories and magenta zinnias in pots, I see two eagles flowing west to east, lower to higher, doing whatever they do at a time like this, but definitely showing themselves off in a faded blue flannel sky with a…
Read More »My wife Rosemary and I live in a townhouse condo atop a former ski slope in Amesbury, Mass., just uphill from the compact but busy downtown. Called Powwow Hill for the original residents in this area, the 330-foot hill is crowned with a small public park and woods that…
Read More »Here’s a story, a memory from my early days in Dracut, Mass. When I was growing up, high-speed aircraft often broke the sound barrier even over residential areas. The enormous boom results from a massive shock wave caused by the aircraft moving faster than the speed of sound. This is…
Read More »While I was born in Lowell, I grew up next door in the town of Dracut, the only place in America with that name, derived from a Draycot in England. Keeping the “y” in the name would have ensured that people know how to pronounce it. This woodsy land was…
Read More »With the annual Lowell area Franco-American week celebration coming up later this month, this seemed to be a good time to re-run this brief essay. There are two million descendants of French-Canadian immigrants in New England. In 2020, I was asked by the hosts of the French-Canadian Legacy Podcast in…
Read More »Eliot Church at South Common (Wikimedia photo) Survey Team With its spire ringed in scaffolding, the Eliot Church on the rim of the South Common in Lowell, Mass., looks like a church in Dresden, Germany, shown yesterday on the TV news, the spire there circled with staging from which workers…
Read More »This prose poem appears in my book What Is the City? (2006), which is out of print but sometimes available in used condition on internet sites. Jackie Brady was a champion boxer in Lowell, Mass., in the 1960s. The local scene from the 1980s described here predates the easing of…
Read More »New poem with Lowell setting in the latest issue of The Café Review in Portland, Maine, which has been around for a long time. I have three poems in this issue, and have been in the magazine previously. Kudos to them for keeping the magazine alive. The CR has interviews,…
Read More »This article, slightly revised, appeared first in Merrimack Valley Magazine in December 2021 when Covid had become part of daily life. Invited to write a piece about holiday time in the area, I dialed back to my childhood and later college years when downtown Lowell was a magnet for people…
Read More »Chath pierSath is the author of several books including the poetry collections “Echoes Lost to the Wind,” “On Earth Beneath Sky: Poems & Sketches,” and “This Body Mystery: Paintings and Poems.” His paintings have been exhibited in Europe, Asia, and North America. He holds a graduate degree in community social…
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