Poetry Baseball introduced me to poetry. At the kitchen table on a rainy Sunday afternoon at age thirteen, I composed a rather lengthy poem in tribute to my favorite baseball player, calling it “The Ballad of Eddie Mathews,” actually a takeoff on a popular song at the time. Somehow it fell into the hands of my English teacher. Sensing some faint flicker of promise (or the complete opposite), she became my self-appointed tutor during the noon recess each day, introducing me to a new world of rhymes, beats, and sonnets. Thereafter, I could only steal furtive glances outside, where the rest of the guys were whacking baseballs and running the bases in my beloved sport, all wrapped in visions of baseball glory--home runs into starry skies, ticker tape parades, the Cooperstown Hall of Fame. All the while I fidgeted in my one-armed wooden desk reciting the “daDUM, daDUM, daDUMs” of the endless dance of iambic pentameter. Only years later did I come to appreciate this curious lesson in irony. How could I not put those lunchtime hours to some use in the future? After a lengthy detour into a legal career, I’ve come full circle. I suppose Mrs. Starr would be glad (and possibly astonished) to know that seven times my poems have been ranked as finalists in the Faulkner-Wisdom Creative Writing Competition, and ten poems have been selected on the short list for finalist or semifinalist in the Faulkner and Boulevard competitions. My poems have been published in Blueline, as an Editor’s Pick in Pooled Ink, and in the anthology Coffee Poems. Thanks, Ms. Starr! Periodic Poems As a welcome to the website and an invitation to return, I would like to share with you an occasional original poem. These offerings will cover a variety of forms, subjects, emotions, and life events. I hope you enjoy them. |
Thursday, January 31 2019
You walk the high wire. I guess you always have. Like a mountain goat at the peak of an Alpine ridge, you see the sunrise first.
There are times you may quiver and stretch wide your arms as all balance seems to forsake you.
The world gasps in dismay and quakes at your fate.
But with a set jaw you hold to the course, and the wild pendular oscillations swing with less violence
until the wire’s mad mutiny finally subsides and you skip lightly to the far platform.
The moment we all at last settle back and sigh in relief you turn and step onto the wire once more.
It’s your greatest incredible charm and your truest asset— you insist on living your life with no net.
-Larkin Edwin Greer
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