[New-Poetry] only football (American) poem I know

[Michael Snider]

>

Here's the last two sections of Howard Nemerov's "Watching Football on  
TV":

VI

Passing and catching overcome the world,
The hard condition of the world, they do
Human intention honor in the world.
A football wants to wobble, that's its shape
And nature, and to make it spiral true
's a triumph in itself, to make it hit
The patterning receiver on the hands
The instant he looks back, well, that's to be
For the time being in a state of grace,
And move the viewers in their living rooms
To lost nostalgic visions of themselves
As in an earlier, other world where grim
Fate in the form of gravity may be
Not merely overcome, but overcome
Casually and with style, and that is grace.


VII

Each year brings rookies and makes veterans,
The have their dead by now, their wounded as well,
They have Immortals in a Hall of Fame,
They have the stories of the tribe, the plays
And instant replays many times replayed.
But even fame will tire of its fame,
And immortality itself will fall asleep.
It's taken many years, but yet in time,
To old men crouched before the ikon's changes,
Changes become reminders, all the games
Are blended in one vast remembered game
Of similar images simultaneous
And superposed; nothing surprises us
Nor can delight, though we see the tight end
Stagger into the end zone again again.

---------------



It's much too long to type in full, but I've loved this poem for  
years--I mentioned it in an essay I wrote more than a quarter century  
ago, "You Must Love Poems, Not Poetry." I still put the essay on my  
website: http://www.mikesnider.org/poetry/mypoems/ and scroll down  
just a little.