Here’s a poem out of a book that a close friend gave to me a few years ago.  The book is Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend: Women Writers on Baseball, edited by Elinor Nauen, and it is a collection of stories, poems, essays, and memoirs about baseball written by women.  I love the layers of meaning in this piece.

Baseball

When you tried to tell me
baseball was a metaphor

for life: the long, dusty travail
around the bases, for instance,

to try to go home again;
the Sacrifice for which you win

approval but not applause;
the way the light closes down

in the last days of the season–
I didn’t believe you.

It’s just a way of passing
the time, I said.

And you said: that’s it.
Yes.