“fail, and fail again”

This past week I watched my first baseball game of 2025! The major teams have a long season from March to September and play 162 games! Now we are in the playoff season and down to the last 4 teams. I am hooked on the TV coverage of the end of the season. Last year, I discovered the poem Casey at the bat! Today, I share another baseball poem, this one from Bruce Smith who is an English Professor at Syracuse University. Smith was born and raised in Philiadelphia and was himself at one time a promising baseball player, trying out for the Phillies! His poem beautfully describes the game with its many subtleties! Enjoy.

The Game
The artist is a creep with his little boxes, but the athlete is a
man
who has stolen glory in all its forms, stolen honey in a cup
from the gods
and hidden it in his insides where the bees drone. I’m always a
boy
as I sit or stand in the shouting place and breathe the doses of men—
smoke and malt—as the night comes down in the exact
pattern
of a diamond, a moonlit hothouse of dirt a boy knows is
something
to spit on and pat into a shape. Dirt’s a cure for the buried
someone.
Even as it begins with its anthem, it’s lost to me, the exact
color
of devotion. So goodbye to the inning and other numbers on scoreboards
and the backs of our team, our blue and red, our lips, our
business,
which is to rip into them, a boy learns, or bark at the hit or
miss.
Men have skill, although I see them fail and fail again and fail
to hit
the curve. I’m always a girl as I aww and ooo. What’s the
infield-fly rule?
I tried to watch the grips and tricks, the metaphysics, the spin,
the positions of fast and still, scratch and spit . . . but I
thought,
in all this infinity, of the Clementes, the Mayses, and the
Yogis,
of the bats of ash I would have to crack and would I have to
squeeze
them home? Would I be asked to sacrifice? Would I belly-
button it
or break my wrists trying not to swing? There’s a box and a
zone
in the air and the dirt I must own. To find my way out
or know where it is I sit, I keep my ticket stub in my fist.

                      Bruce Smith (pub. in The New Yorker September 7, 2009)

Prayer:
Lord God,
the scriptures remind us
that we
fail to follow,
that we
fail to stay on the straight and narrow.
Yes Lord,
we fail and fail again!
The same scriptures remind us
that your
love is unfailing,
your forgiveness is unfailing, and
your hope in us is unfailing, and
your invitation to try again is unfailing.
Help us to walk
in your love,
to embrace your forgiveness, and
to live into your hope.
Remind us, day after day because we are
apt to forget. So today though we may
fail and fail again,
your presence
and your grace enables us
to try and try again. Amen.