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Deus Ex Machina
DEUS EX MACHINA
–Montreal Impact victory in 2015, over Mexican team Pachuca in the CONCACAF championship quarter finals
The fans of visiting Pachuca, in sacred masks
of bloodthirsty wrestlers, believed that fate
would favor Mexico The minutes passed
away and they still led on aggregate
but we were sixty thousand strong, naively
hopefully, cheering in our crumbling stands
The football gods smiled indulgently
on the Mexican supporters’ victory plans
When suddenly, for no reason at all
Puskas, Lord of thunder, reached down and flicked
the ball to a one-hit-wonder on Montreal
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The Rout
THE ROUT
The keeper leaning on his goalpost calls
to his full backs: ‘Boys, let’s stay alert!’
They turn and yawn at him, kick the dirt
Still, the tall one cups his hand and yells:
‘Don’t lose yer focus!’ to the laterals
who are staring at the muddied shirt
of the central midfield, acting hurt
as his holding partner laughs and rolls
his eyes looking at the winger on the right
while to the left his pendant checks the clock
The striker smiles: he’s knocked in four tonight
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The Game Plan
TheStartingEleven is a crossroads of my obsession with poetry and my deep love of football (soccer), a sport that believe holds the potential to bring the world together on so many levels. I also see the enormous potential for metaphor in the beautiful game.
My objective in this blog is to try my best to exploit the poetic possibilities of the sport, from nostalgic personal moments to football’s overlapping with the great events of our complex planet.
The game plan, to begin with, is to play on the eleven player to a side formation by writing in an eleven-line form, with variable rhyme schemes – a kind of flexible eleven-line version of the sonnet, another form that I love using, and which I have adopted for my other poetry blog, sonnetsforpeace.com.
Hope you enjoy the poems and the football references! Please don’t hesitate to leave a comment.
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The Fallen General
THE FALLEN GENERAL
Last year, the world stopped and froze mid-air
as the Danish midfield general collapsed
in the middle of the clash untouched
His heart gave way and but for CPR
and then defibrillation he would, it’s sure,
have breathed his last right there, a warrior
on the field of battle O innocent
world of 2021 when European war
was read about in dusty documents
we thought we’d shelved forevermore
and mentioned just as football metaphor
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