Summer always makes me maudlin, and lately I've been thinking a lot of baseball, my family, my dad "Poppa" and I found this in the scrapbooks. Thought I'd share it.

Poetry Dots a Baseball i

Boys practice poetry and I critique,
verses rehearsed on green tablets
with lines ruled in chalk. On the
mound a youth launches himself
into a question mark, exclamations
pop the catcher's mitt and another
hapless hitter strikes empty cliches:
one -two -three. The rhythm flows
from boy to boy like words strung
into flawless similes, punctuated
by "swing batta" and "rock-n-fire".

I am the didactic stanza, exhorting
youth to the grammar of summer's
art, cheering when the centerfielder
turns back to home and plucks an
apostrophe from space in scissored
strides, clapping when the shortstop
scoops commas from dirt and slings
hyphens to the stretch at first. By
season's end in shimmery August,
second-to-short-to-first is the infield's
sonnet and our runners enjamb bases
with the plagiarizer's stolen grace.


Each laughing child with leather, cleats
and grass-greened knees is a poem,
but the song is the last boy chosen, joyful
smile bursting into stanzas of glee
when at last, long last, he dots an i
and writes his dash of summer poetry.




Sep 9/1967


Charles Elledge