by Michael Ceraolo
You saw what I did coming up in my mid-thirties,
so you can imagine what I could have done
if I’d come up a decade or so earlier:
if that writer had ever heard of Big Luke
he might have based the character Hobbs on me,
at least in part,
the part about getting a late start in the bigs,
though my reasons were different:
the war took years away from everybody,
they weren’t hiring us in the white majors,
and even the Negro Leagues
didn’t find me until after the war;
it wasn’t getting shot like in the book
I did get shot decades later
and it ended my life, but that
wasn’t the stuff of literature,
it was during an ordinary robbery.
