But it seems to me a very good way of putting a stop to all this very minimal 'going viral' is to post a new poem by me, that I finished about five minutes ago.
I don't want anybody to think I don't like cricket. Of course I do but it's much funnier to take a sardonic view of a most English and ritualistic of events such as a 4 day County Championship match. It took me two matches to get the poem and I'm not saying it's right. Having begun with the eight-syllable line, it doesn't seem to be the right vehicle for the later lines but that doesn't matter.
It is not really about cricket, is it. It's about cliché, I would have thought. But I often think a poem's not a poem until it's about at least two things.
It can go into the folder to be revised if need be when considered for the projected booklet, The Perfect Book (David Green Books), provisionally planned for publication on 17/10/2019.
The Summer Game
It’s too late to be afternoon,
too early to be evening. Not
quite time for gin yet, and yet, there’s
little else to do.
The summer
isn’t long enough for some so
cricket makes it seem like it is.
A man records it all, a dot
pencilled in so that when he wants
to know that nothing happened, he
can see that nothing did. For his
is the drudgery of knowing
until one nips back from outside
off, through the gate, and sends off stump
cartwheeling back across the land
that once perhaps was countryside
where cartwheels used to turn with less
use of metaphor but cartwheel
is the word we use for when stumps
are knocked down like that so never
thought we needed any other.
