The Injustice Of Baseball Poem by John Courtney

Voice, let go the ground:
that you last another season
in tandem with a surface
draped on deaf eyes, travel
deceptively warm into swollen
bliss, is in no truth greater
a trick or infinitely closer than
the mercy we provide simply
by hearing the day, or admitting
witness to such a callous sleeper.

You protect nothing and distance
with vast nearness, depend upon
illness or quaking heart, chase
with endless ghost to frame
an idling salvation, a king who
poaches his own mind, more
alone than the final face you
take from beautiful mother.

What hasn't vanished yet can
be delivered, even the still water
will forgive you if you leave
now, mute the televisions of
disease, billboards of their flesh,
the speed at which we were
designed is no match for the
electronic cancer on parade.

Let go the ground, the sound,
save this summer house, the sun
below our tiny toes, the breathing
noiseless open fields, the boys
showing off the girls, the crowd
on the radio behind an announcer
of futile scores, colors that have
lasted another beautiful season
on this quiet ground: let go the voice.