Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Monday, September 23rd, 2024.

Today's poem is by Donald Hall, and it's called The Baseball Players.

I'll read it once, offer a few comments, and read it one more time.

The Baseball Players. Okay. offer a few comments and read it one more time. The baseball players.

Against the bright grass, the white-nickered players tense, seize and attend.

A moment ago, outfielders and infielder adjusted their clothing,

glanced at the sun and settled forward, hands on knees.

The pitcher walked back of the hill, established his cap, and returned. The catcher twitched a forefinger.

The batter rotated his bat in a slow circle. But now they pause, wary, exact, suspended.

While abiding moonrise lightens the angel of the overgrown hardens,

and Walter Blake Adams, who died at 14, waits under the footbridge.

This poem seems to combine two of Donald Hall's great preoccupations.

One, obviously, is baseball.

He is a great lover of baseball.

He has written other poems about baseball,

poems that are ostensibly about baseball but largely suggestive of something else and a number of nonfiction works about baseball as well. The other is

loss and the sometime finding of what has been lost, or the way that those we have lost

find their way back into our lives. And the two combine in a miraculous and unexpected way in this poem, where both forces or both

elements are moving in different directions and meet in this nexus that's really remarkable.

The poem begins to be about baseball and this moment that any lover of baseball knows so well,

this repeated intermediary busyness of the game of baseball,

...