THE LEAGUES

There will always be the Fall
On those August days
When humidity walls itself between sports uniforms
Boys still spirited by baseball
And those who pack an extra top and bottoms
For the football field tossed
With these first falling leaves
Pig skin kids beyond the fouling line
Toss and jet to one another;
It is the mid season between an adolescent jersey,
Without pads
And the baseball had Horsley crying for their team
To win the last few games
From the cotton candy stands
Those their father’s have recorded on late Sunday TV…
A generation in the umbra of overlapping games
And the first few featured articles
On the lineup for the Dolphins and the Rams
These stormy late hurricanes show no signs of easing up
And the paper’s writers fathom the grunting games
While boys all in uniform
Reconnoiter the change in pace
And posture between the diamond and the line of scrimmage
It’s more and more impossible to hold on to
Or forget,
The right field’s conformism
In a Mickey Mantle glove
And a Spaulding bulleted football
One sees as a blur across the field
With the keenness insight
Witness shortstops
As they transform into receivers
Winning digs the deepest roots
First in strikes out
And in home runs;
Fading into line backs
Where the physique of crunching larger lads
Trained by September to transfer
To a play of broken bones.

 Ken Siegelman
Brooklyn Poet Laureate
September, 2007