The Sweet Spot (1962-1972)
The boy on the front porch
stares into the palm
of his baseball glove.
Baseball a game of statistics,
history, and metaphor:
at school he learned
the Greeks invented nepotism,
the Olympics, and the phalanx:
a rectangular battle formation
turned on its side,
diamond shaped
like a baseball infield.
Ten years later he stops for coffee
on his way back from the draft board,
washing his hands until the skin
peels off like a napalm kiss.
In Saigon, he wandered
from café to café missing home
and writing letters:
who won the World Series?
he wanted to know,
who will win the war?
Was it really better
to be red than dead?
Remembering how it felt that day:
feeling summer coming on,
trying hard to compare
the heat in Vietnam
to the sound of the bat
as it hits the ball:
the sweet spot, they say,
hoping it’s enough to stay alive.
Michael Minassian is a Contributing Editor for Verse-Virtual, an online poetry journal. His poetry collections Time is Not a River, Morning Calm, and A Matter of Timing are all available on Amazon. A new chapbook, Jack Pays a Visit, was released in 2022. For more information: https://michaelminassian.com.
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