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Somewhere in Southern Indiana
Somewhere in
southern Indiana
a boy sits
listening to a baseball game
on the radio.
It is very quiet
in the house
where his mother sits
darning socks
and his father flips
through a seed
catalogue. The dark
wooded hills
surround the house,
which is far
removed from the city lights
and baseball
games. The only sounds
outside are the
barking of a neighbor’s dog
down the road
and, occasionally,
the crunching
of pick-up tires over rocks.
This boy who
listens to the baseball
game never
reads poetry, except when
he is required
to for his English class.
He would not be
interested in what
I write. He
thinks poetry must be about
English knights
and ladies in castles,
not boys who
listen to baseball games,
mothers who
darn socks, fathers who
look through
seed catalogues.
One day the boy
will move away
from southern
Indiana to a big city,
where he will
go to fine restaurants
and concerts
and plays and begin to
read poetry on
his own. He will feel
something stir
within, and he will go
to the library,
browse through magazines
in the
periodicals room, pull off volumes
of poems from
the stacks, and take them
home to his
apartment. He will feel
a thumping in
his chest, take out a piece
of paper, and
try to make a poem.
Every sentence
he begins will pull
him back to a
scene in which a boy
sits listening
to a baseball game
on the radio, a
mother sits darning
socks, a father
sits flipping though
a seed
catalogue. The longer the young
man listens to
the thumping within,
the louder he
will hear the barking
of a dog and
the crunching
of pick-up
tires over rocks.
©
Norbert Krapf |
