Bill Buckner, RIP

As a sixteen-year-old Fenway Park vendor, I watched poetry disguised as a baseball game on April 25, 1990. Bill Buckner, during the swan song of his career, returned to the Boston Red Sox to hit the last and most unlikely home run of his 22-year career… 

25 April 1990
The hitter hobbled by injuries and age
Pilloried and pummeled, the great baseball sageGristled delivers encore on greenest of stage
By authoring that beautiful final page

One raw, sopping, surreal April Back Bay night
Half-filled band box thrills to ethereal sight,
Of ancient batsman long wronged now making right
By home plate exorcising scribes’ serpentine spite

Wearing mustaches below and above nose,
stirrups high, bill low, and red, white, and blue clothes
The man, Sherm Feller told, batting seventh, chose
To fix it in ’90 that clock stopped, time froze

Hard lumber cracks stitched cowhide far, far away
I stop and drop my Coca-Cola cup tray
In red, blue, and green seats not a fan does stay
To see pure white ball bounce cleansed from glove to clay

Deep to right field a stadium’s wonder flies
Small wall upends the right fielder’s taller thighs
Gallops speedster in senior citizen guise
rounds bases, ’46 Johnny Pesky cries

Hitter running in water, running in sand,
He barrels past Wally Joyner and grandstand,
Jalopy rollicking ’round second and third, and
Gasping, creaking to standup homer unplanned

Old angel of Cali careens over wall
Spring washes forever gone the sins of Fall,
With limping legs that arched Mookie’s dribbling ball,
Twenty-two floats above yet touches ’em all.

Vitriol for spine refusing boys’ game’s bends
Fairweather fans, first baseman once more close friends
Inside-the-parker his redemption tale ends
Or did boo-birds-turned-bravos make their amends?