After School Baseball
by
James Shammas
(Age: 44)
copyright 02-02-2005
Age Rating: 13 to 127
I ran home from school, waving the winning ball in the air. Flying up the steps and through the door, I slid down the hall, a baseball player approaching the plate, when under the seeming echo of drowning cheers between the ears of phantom fans, I found Mom in the center of the den, the rust-colored lapel of a tattered robe still bunched up around her neck. Her stark-white eyeballs looked thrown at hard-hitting bats and hands emerged like claws from soiled sleeves; I could not find a mitt to protect them, nor did I see helmets, shin guards, or the player's rule book-- just Dad's mildew-stained duffel bag: the kind that's thrown in a car trunk, and falls with a thud. A gentle kick in her side though, made her blink, so I tip-toed backward with my cleats, out the door and up the stairs, caressing my ball and hugging my bat, sliding into the seventh inning stretch. Hours later, I crept down the stairs and found her over the stove, a cigarette dangling from a fat lip and bloody mouth, making my favorite: spaghetti and meatballs.
She said it wasn't everyday you hit a homerun.
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This is either very funny or very sad, I will give you two interpretations and hopefully one will be right. Either, A: you slide into your mother and gave her a fat lip, she didn't say anything because it is not everyday you hit a home run. Which is very funny, or B: you came running home to tell you mom how you hit a home run only to find her beat the hell up by your father already so you stop and go up the stairs, still thinking about you ball game, like it is no big deal, mom gets hit all the time, or like, don't think about that that didn't happen can't deal with that, wait awhile and check on mom, notice fat lip but still not focusing on that but how she has made your favorite meal, which is as I said very sad, now one or the other has to be right. Right. Great write, good job, thank you
I cannot find the words to express the sadness and the anger your poem raised in my heart. All I could think of was this poor mother, caught in the the tyranny of domestic abuse and still trying to be as "normal" as she could manage for her son's big moment....this is beyond sad. The way that you wrote about it, so matter of fact, made a much more powerful statement than ranting and raving would have done.
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