PAD Challenge Day 25

Late again!  Today's challenge took me a while - I worked on it most of the day.  Poetic Asides' prompt was to write a sports poem.  NaPoWriMo invited us to write a cento: a poem composed entirely of lines lifted from other poems.  This is my first crack at one, and I spent the day reading and re-reading several baseball-themed poems, including a great one by my poet friend BJ Ward, and agonizing over what lines to use and in what sensible order. Like yesterday's lipogram, it's harder than it sounds, but here is the result:

Baseball Cento

A night game, the silver potion of the lights –

white the chalked-off lines in the grass,

white the immaculate uniform,

the white-knickered players

tense, seize and attend

against the bright grass.

The pitcher walks back of the hill,

establishes his cap and returns –

left-hander curlicues called strike threes

around the outside corner.

But

into the slice of percentage,

that possibility of heaven

that is a swing range –

the bleached horsehide white:

the color of nothing,

caught like a cheek before it ducks

by shivery hickory,

and the crack is like a starter gun.

The ball, a scintilla

high in the black backdrop of the sky,

is like a prayer,

and you are the team’s only angel

to catch it, snare what is speeding

toward its treetop nest.

Your glove turns into a blossom, the ball

a bee-line from the sky

into the sweet nectar of out.

Even our thieveries, well done, are blessed

with a certain luminousness,

the fierce legitimacy of the neatly stolen,

as the moon passes over the pitcher’s mound

like the slowed stride of an aging shortstop.

The stars hover like old umpires

over the diamond,

the emerald theater of the night.

Source poems: 

Robert Pinsky, "The Night Game"

BJ Ward, "Upon Hearing that Baseball is Boring to Today's Youth"

Michael Blumenthal, "Night Baseball"

Donald Hall, "The Baseball Players"

Robert Fitzgerald, "Cobb Would Have Caught It"

Marianne Moore, "Baseball and Writing"

Rob Vogt, "The Path to the Dugout"