For me, baseball takes too long and also I’m a lifer Cubbies fan, but I remember really enjoying listening to my Opa’s Cardinals on the radio in the backyard when visiting in St. Louis, and I enjoyed getting an afternoon in the all-purpose room watching TV as the Mets won the World Series in 1969. Just now, I enjoyed this poem, and I hope everyone else does; it’s about baseball, yet more. Click through, and read a bit about this poem from the author.
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my ancestors rose and cheered.
From their ancient graves,
pairs of arms rose to make the wave.
Every burial site, a stadium and,
for every one of his at-bats
Mayon Volcano spat a puff of smoke
visible for miles. Children in T-shirts
with the number 50, hand-scrawled by Sharpies
would run into the streets and clang
on metal pans calling all to feast
and when Benny’s cleats dug into the box,
the little cloud of dust rising from his spikes
would drift across continents, into the living room
of every Filipino, issuing a sneeze
which would be followed by a blessing.
The diaspora, a flood of blessings,
watching the orange, blue, and white uniforms
pixelated into millions of screens.
Tens of thousands of nurses held their breaths
when they looked up between shifts
and saw him rest the bat on his shoulder
staring down the pitcher. When Benny Agbayani
was a Met, whole families, once torn apart
by distance held each other close, wrapped
together tightly in the embrace of phone cords,
the web of telephone lines crisscrossing the nation.
Each long distance call the shimmering pulse of a wrist
bracing for the recoil of the bat making contact.
When Benny fielded fly balls we’d all look
into the sun for the speck of something—
something to ease us into the heartbeat
of Americana where it was always
summer and the lawn markings
formed grids visible from space.
When Benny Agbayani was a Met we thought
the organ’s roar was for us and the syncopated applause
put us into a rhythm in tune to our hearts.
When Benny Agbayani put his mitt to the ground
to stop a daisy cutter, millions of us put our ears
to the earth to hear the rumblings
of what we hoped would be thousands of footsteps,
following his path. But instead they were galloping
towards home. We’d raise the brim of our caps
and nod our chins at a cool breeze
or the smell of fryer oil. And when Shea
sang in one voice “B-B-B-Benny and the Mets”
we stood and put are hands to our hearts.
We rocked back and forth on our heels
watching the strike zone get smaller
and smaller. Watched as the sun made
our shadows grow and we waited until the roster
made room for us in the show, now and in the ever after.
Copyright © 2024 by Oliver de la Paz. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 29, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.
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