More than a Baseball Game
The baseball game was enjoyable
not for watching players standing still
like cows in the field
with only an occasional crow flying overhead
as a rare car drives by ignored;
nor for the beauty of its dull field:
a meticulously-short carpet of grass
worn by years of fruitless prayer
one generation after the next;
nor for the joy of watching three men
reading each others’ twitches
like a lily-pad frogs plotting for their fly
ending in one quick climactic swing
hit-or-miss, with neither brilliantly exciting.
nor for the mystery of men underground
climbing out of their dugout like locusts
for only a very brief life
filled with sighs or buzzing applause.
But instead, the game was enjoyable
because my love sat next to me:
Our conversations danced with laughter,
our gestures full of playful teases,
and we rolled in food and drinks.
For desert, my mind gave me short illusions:
the field glowed a bright green
and stood up like a dog jumping to the window
when a car pulls in the drive way.
The clouds puffed up and drew the players skyward.
The baseball diamond, shook and rose off the field.
And everything thing inanimate, animated.
My mind serves up such gifts occasionally,
and what better place to share them but in a poem.
Yet they pass quickly, like the game, like this poem
but deep shared love echoes forever, it seems.
– by Sabio Lantz, May 2017
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Prompt: Paul, @ d’Verse Poet’s Pub, give a pleasantly vague prompt by discussing “underground”, inspiring us with a poem by Seamus Heaney and song by The Jam. I wrote this poem after returning from a baseball game — not something I do often, but would do again with her in a second!
