Playing Baseball With Chicago on The Rise

[RonPrice]

I wrote this little piece about the context for my own first baseball experiences in the ealry 1950s when the White Sox had a new lease on life--as they are now.

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DRY GRASS AND THE KINGDOM

 

Poetry can communicate the actual quality of experience with a subtlety and precision approachable by no other means. -F.R. Leavis, New Bearings in English Poetry.

 

If your everyday life seems poor to you, do not accuse it; accuse yourself, tell yourself you are not poet enough to summon up its riches, since for the creator there is no poverty and no poor or unimportant place. -R.M. Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, 17 February 1903.

 

 

I can remember those days when I was young,

dry grass under a tree where we sat in summer

and wondered what to do on long hot days:

you could only play so much baseball

and it was too early to go swimming.

We all sat there: George, Benny, Ken Pizer.

Life had hardly started yet--1953--

the beginning of an age, a Kingdom,

celebrated with Monopoly, Sorry,

swimming and endless sittings under this tree.

We were not troubled by war, women or

the wickedness of the world.

Scientific discoveries interested us not,

as long as we could watch our television

programs at the end of the day and

our parents didn’t argue.

Secret disquietudes, inner lonelinesses,

the tensions of a society on the edge of

self-destruction did not touch us

on this dry grass under the tree.

 

Ron Price

November 2001