The Pecan Park Eagle: Ode To An Old Baseball Cover I Found While Playing Catch with My 8 Year Old Son Neal In An Abandoned School Yard in 1993
Tattered friend, I found you again,
Laying flat in a field of yesterday’s hope.
Your resting place? An abandoned schoolyard.
When parents move away, the children go too.
How long have you been here,
Strangling in the entanglement of your grassy grave,
Bleaching your brown-ness in the summer sun,
Freezing your frailness in the ice of winter?
How long, old friend, how long?
Your magical essence exploded from you long ago.
God only knows when.
Perhaps, it was the result of one last grand slam.
One last grand slam, a solitary cherishment,
Now remembered only by the doer of that distant past deed.
Only the executioner long remembers the little triumphs.
The rest of the world never knows, or else, soon forgets.
I recovered you today from your ancient tomb,
From your place near the crunching sound of my footsteps.
I pulled you from your enmeshment in the dying July grass,
And I wanted to take you home with me.
Oh, would that the warm winds of spring might call us,
One more time, awakening our souls in green renewal
To that visceral awareness of hope and possibility.
To soar once more in spirit, like the Pecan Park Eagle,
High above the billowing clouds of a summer morning,
In flight destiny – to all that is bright and beautiful.
There is a special consolation in this melancholy reunion.
Because you once held a larger world within you,
I found a larger world in me.
Come home with me, my friend,
… Come home.
… Bill McCurdy, July 4, 1993.
The Pecan Park Eagle 
June 15, 2010 at 11:51 pm |
Truly enjoyed this ode to a baseball!