Poetry Friday: Baseball

Many Bostonians...and lots of people who live in the suburbs of the "Athens of America"...are rabid Red Sox fans--including my daughter. Some folks around these parts think baseball is life...at least from April through October. Yes, Boston is definitely a baseball city. Although I have to admit that Beantown has gone a bit football crazy in recent years due to the success of the New England Patriots. Me? I prefer poetry...so here's a baseball poem for this Poetry Friday.


Baseball
by Gail Mazur
(for John Limon)

The game of baseball is not a metaphor
and I know it’s not really life.
The chalky green diamond, the lovely
dusty brown lanes I see from airplanes
multiplying around the cities
are only neat playing fields.
Their structure is not the frame
of history carved out of forest,
that is not what I see on my ascent.

And down in the stadium,
the veteran catcher guiding the young
pitcher through the innings, the line
of concentration between them,
that delicate filament is not
like the way you are helping me,
only it reminds me when I strain
for analogies, the way a rookie strains
for perfection, and the veteran,
in his wisdom, seems to promise it,
it glows from his upheld glove...


You can read the rest of the poem here at the website of the Poetry Foundation.


At Wild Rose Reader today, I have a fairy tale poem entitled Immortality.