In front of a hole in the right field wall
my father spreads the tarpaulin to protect
the grounds from a sudden downpour.

His once slender waist now bulges like
the Babe’s, too many center-cut pork chops
and home-grown spuds. On his forearm, a tattoo,

Hands Across the Sea, two hands shaking
over the red, white and blue, the green, white
and gold, a tryst between Ireland and America.

With a North-Irish brogue, he’d tell us
they lament the loss of the old country
where they hadn’t a flute to jig to,

this is the greatest country in the world
and don’t you forget it.
As if forgetting how he’d gotten these afternoons

at the stadium: the truck owner, a well-connected Yank,
one hand washing the other, I guess, who bestowed
that job upon him after its wheels crushed

his five-year-old son’s head,  a job he kept
through the Golden Age of Baseball
‘til the New York, New Haven and Hartford,

a pensioned position, beckoned. In lieu of his son’s blues
he saw Lou Gehrig’s weep, his brittle voice
bouncing off the bleachers and DiMaggio’s velvets

squint in the two o’clock sun, his hands sheltering them
as though he were saluting. At home,
thirty blocks south, we baked scones to the tattoo of the kettle

and the drone of Mel Allen’s loamy Going, going, gone.

A Pushcart Prize nominee in poetry, fiction and non fiction, Liz Dolan was born, braised and bronzed in The Bronx.

This poem was selected as the winner of the 2008 "Play Ball" Writing Contest..

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Keywords : baseball, Yankees, Irish, family

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