Nearby Café: Sepoy Rebellion performance poetry

Strikeout

While teaching boys to swing with abandon at your slow pitches that,
struck hard, seem to float like white satellites at the end of their climb
into the glorious splendor of a summer day, you catch sight of Mike.
He is the overweight, meek, slow of movement, all-thumbs boy,
the new and unwanted player that this team of athletic children stubbornly shuns.
He sits alone by the dugout, already threatened by his father's
loud expectations, and throws pebbles at the grass.
He aims in the general direction of third base
as if his desultory and light artillery could distract
the more demanding penance of the day that waits at home plate,
that lurks up on the stands.
You wish you could give him the strength to accept this grief
that passes for sport and in so doing render his spirit free,
content to play for enjoyment's sake, for love of play, and not,
like a trained but wounded seal, perform at his blood's expense
while the sharks of his father's anger lie in wait.
But you have to call his name at least twice
before he ambles over, eyes downcast.
His father's attitude hovers above,
and it is not only a coarse repository of baseball's platitudes
but also a veiled threat.
You pitch carefully, encouraging him with kind words but also
demanding that he exert himself.
You hope that he will hit a freeing, gigantic parabola of joy
that will electrify all, that will open the window
of the game as a path through which he will find the vistas
of his soul and the meaning of his every day.
Instead, he barely manages to hit a couple of slow grounders that weakly bounce
away toward the face of the gathering storm and your growing dismay.

Oh, well, you think, as he walks away to be alone again,
back to pebbles. to grass, to innocuous play,
perhaps one day this hard practice will pay
and you will both learn to forgive and forget.

The Wil Wynn Archive