Baseball Poem

Rainbow Slugger

               by Tim Peeler 

The people that "love" you
Whip your butt raw,
Drop you head first
Into a locked-closet weekend.
You will grow up
To play mailbox baseball,
You will apply the geometry of your
schooling,
See the flat plane,
The simple dimension of your swing,
A hand flies at the face of your dream,
Your home plate points toward hell,
The extended angles climb
Toward the misty heights of a rainbow.
The rainbow on the side of a mailbox
Explodes in chips of pastel paint
As you connect so perfectly,
A cannon blast against a siren
Against the black hide of the night.     

  (with permission of the author from his book:
    “Touching All the Bases”
          Poems from Baseball
             available from Amazon
                     or direct from the publisher at: www.mcfarlandpub.com 

  “In the family pictures,
          my brother stands at the plate
  forever waiting on a pitch,
        my dad squats hy the dugout fence,
  his chin resting on his hands;
   somewhere beyond the eye or the camera,
    I hold a huge scarlet plum behind my back,
 left leg kicked high in a pitching motion,
    as near to the spirit or the game
  as I'd ever be.”

Tim Peeler celebrates with candor and wit both the overlooked and the standout as he merges the topics of personal and baseball rediscovery. The poet reconsiders events and people from his adolescence, offering the reader new takes on old memories, gracefully relating the foibles of family and friends, and cataloging the heroic feats and tragic flaws of players he watched, read about — or merely imagined.

English lecturer, journal editor, essayist and poet, TlM PEELER lives in Hickory, North Carolina. He is a winner of the Jim Harrison Award for his contributions to baseball poetry.