Poem: Baseball Under Ground

The story behind this poem is that my wife was working on a flower bed under the front windows, and deep down, she found an old baseball. No doubt, one of my boys had buried it at some point in baseball childhood. The poems comes from there. – Kevin

An old baseball, sunk
into soil, never grows
roots, only smudge
and grime, remnants
of past time

Still, some kid here tried;

Small fingers, folded
on a stitched face
of white thread
and knitted lace,
dug down into the earth
with barely a trace
of which game the ball
even belonged to –

a home run hit
to cheering mates
or a hesitant swing,
a loss that grates –

Some summer days
race forward like a batter
running base – you can bury
the lede, if you truly believe
in surfacing the story —

Other days slink, slow,
a seed for song,
a game of imagination
most of us still play
minutes before the sun
fades away

PS — image credit: “Johnson Park” flickr photo by dankeck https://flickr.com/photos/dankeck/53548608010 shared into the public domain using (CC0)