I Sing in Praise of Box Scores

I Sing in Praise of Box Scores

James Green

I sing in praise of box scores, nourishment
of boyhood fancy, heaven’s code, inscribed
heart’s bliss, soul’s blood, abstraction of events
Olympian, a metaphor of life.
 
In columns, rows, and agate font, in runes
known only to initiates, once more
a drama plays: the batting slump that ends,
a shutout lost, redemption for an error.
 
The cyphers animate forgotten games,
become enchanted archives striking sparks
transmuting time to dreamy fields ordained
by boys of summer who with quickened hearts
 
imagine when the count is full digging-in
alone to face the Mad Hungarian.
 

James Green’s poems have appeared in literary magazines in Ireland, the UK, and the USA. In addition, he has published six chapbooks of poetry, with one named winner of the Charles Dickson Chapbook Contest sponsored by the Georgia Poetry Society and another nominated for the MLA Conference on Christianity and Literature Book of the Year. His most recent work is the translation of a collection of poems the Myanmar poet Maung Sein Win

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