Fetch – and World Cup Soccer
World Cup play has started! We caught a few games on tv this weekend and look forward to more. There aren’t a ton of famous poems about soccer / football, though plenty are written. This despite the fact that soccer is one of the world’s favorite ways to play or watch an afternoon away.
One more recent well-known soccer poem is Christopher Merrill’s A Boy Juggling a Soccer Ball which evokes the play of light and shadow and summer’s end against the motions of juggling the ball. It reminds me of some of those golden Autumn afternoons when it’s warm-crisp and the light makes the shadows long, and kids running on a green field seem timeless, as if they represented all kids, anywhere.
I was a soccer mom for 12 years — and I simultaneously miss those days and don’t miss them at all now that our kids are no longer playing soccer. I loved the game itself, no matter what age and skill level was involved. The tournaments were great fun, and mostly the kids were all good kids.
But the parents! My goodness.
On a team of 5-year-olds, one girl’s parents always dropped her off on the far side of the field, boots in hand, then drove off. She didn’t even tie her own laces yet! The girl wasn’t interested in soccer, though she didn’t mind being at the games. She just toodled around the field, only getting near the ball by accident. Meanwhile, she picked bouquets of dandelions from the field. I imagine she spent the spring on a softball field, picking clover in the outfield.
Another kid, maybe ten years old, played with a mildly fractured kneecap for five weeks. That was until the kid’s parents finally agreed that the limping “wasn’t the normal kind of limping.” I’m not sure even that would have been admitted if the coach hadn’t refused to continue to play the child without a note from a doctor.
Our son played on a team with a kid that perpetually caused them to lose. The boy, bigger than others of his age, bowled other kids over. The proverbial bull in a china shop, except on a soccer field that caused all sorts of fouls and plenty of penalty kicks.
The mom screamed at the refs for penalizing her kid. She was kicked out of several games. Her explanation? “He’s big-boned and has too much momentum to stop.” Apparently he had too much momentum to turn, either. But how many games do you have to be kicked out of, before you shut your mouth? More than four, I guess.
I liked being at our kids’ games — soccer being one of the sports I actually know all the rules to — but I could live with fewer spectators, or some sort of parent-silencer/taser to use on the sidelines. To that end, this week’s poem is Fetch:
Fetch
You must be blind
If you weren’t so fat you’d call the play better
Faster, dammit faster, the other way
Why can’t you kick right
What’d you take her out for
Can’t win if you bench your best player
What I wished never came
Parents on the pitch in scratchy nylon kit
Facing off under a cloudy drizzle
Let’s see you kick, trap the ball, go ahead
Tell me you didn’t hip-check that other dad
Go wade the ditch to get the ball back
You know which way the goal is, right?
You run. Fetch! Fetch faster. Dammit.
If you enjoyed Fetch, or even if you didn’t
If sports-related poetry isn’t your thing but you still want to celebrate the World Cup excitement, lithub has a list of 32 books to read during the World Cup–though not about the game. There’s one book by a writer from each of the 32 countries, organized by group of course. Only one book of poems in the mix, but some of the novels are kind of experimental, so maybe those could be classed with poetry.
For books more directly about soccer, try this group of 20 listed by World Soccer Talk. They include soccer and club histories, sports reporting and memoir, and novelizations related to soccer.
You’ll find more of my poems on this blog or in the collection Stars Crawl Out From Their Caves, which is available in both ebook and print. Missed a poem of the week? Links to prior weeks are on this page.
Yes, that’s our recent high school grad in the photo, making the save for her school team.
Comments welcome, as always. Have a great week, and look for another poem next Monday.