Reviving the Art of Baseball Doggerel
I swing,
with eyes: perfect,
brown bat — moving,
above brown dirt,
(above my bare brown feet).
Whistling seams widen my eyes;
the ball pops!
I hear my Dad (jumping off the mound).
He’s really twenty thousand people
cheering for me,
and my home run
(that went all the way over the dugout).
There’s a sports metaphor for everything:
the wind does its thing down the river
and the crowd goes wild. A grand slam
of a Sunday: lumpy pancakes for breakfast
as the day breaks open, twin-yoked, lucky.
Corn and Sugar, those American gods,
or mascots, depending on how you look at them.
Was it just this summer that I felt like a rookie?
Usually just answering the question
is best. Yes. My sister, on the other hand,
is the one who really knows how I feel
about dogs, the way we both sprint
tongues-out towards the fun
that could hurt us, how we share a luck
that means it usually doesn’t —
think me getting on the school bus jacketless
and the clouds parting — a bat’s-crack
of thunder — then it’s gone,
every year on our late-May birthday.
Caroline Riley is a poet and writer from Maryland. She holds an MFA in poetry from West Virginia University. She currently lives in Philadelphia, but continues to support the Washington Nationals.
Have you ever thrown a ball 100 miles an hour?
Everything hurts,
even your ass hurts.
I see pictures of my face
and say,
“Holy shit”,
but that’s the strain you feel
when you throw.
People say,
“Man he’s an ass-hole.”
Could be,
depends on if you
pissed me off
or not.
On this day, in 1939,
The first-ever-televised
Baseball game ocurred.
It was between Princeton
And Columbia, at
Columbia’s Bakers Field,
And Princeton won, 2-1.
He was not
the best Negro League player
the Dodgers could have signed.
But he was the first
so he had to be better
than legendary.
Where did his calm come from
when he took the field
amidst a rain of insults
hurled like a pyroclastic flow?
How did he show the best
in men
while men showered him
with the worst?
How could he do it
one more day
let alone the next
and then the next?
Whatever it was
burned in him
with such intensity and
white hot heat that,
like Vulcan,
he forged impenetrable armor.
Baseball retired
Jackie Robinson’s 42
for all teams for all time.
The answer to life, the universe
and everything,
is it any wonder
it is the angle at which
sunlight and water
turn into rainbows?
Phillip has recently been published in Poeming Pigeon, and received an Honorable Mention in 2020 in the Oregon Poetry Association’s Contest for new poets. He lives in Beaverton, Ore., with his wife, who is also a poet.