Fungoes and Fastballs

By Phil Cousineau

Manny Perez, By mjl816 on Flickr (Original version)UCinternational (Crop) - Originally posted to Flickr as "Untitled"Cropped by UCinternational, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18828686

Where baseball and haiku overlap is the art of deceptive simplicity and the impulse to describe the shining moments of the deeply real. As Jack Kerouac writes in Dharma Bums, “A real haiku has to be simple as porridge, but make you see the real thing.”  The Basho of Baseball, Yogi Berra, agrees saying, “You can observe a lot just by watching.”

            a baseball moon

one hundred and eight stitches

     rising over the light towers

 

      the coach whacks the ball —

a fungo flung high across the sky

     —the crowd gasps with joy

 

      floating knuckleball —

      the hitter lunges at the

   butterfly with the hiccoughs

 

         chilly spring night

a sizzling hit past the mound

     warms up the reliever

 

          blue motel room

the rookie hurler can’t sleep –

regrets three hanging curveballs

 

      warm summer wind

in the seventeenth inning

a vendor shouts—last beer!

 

      nighttime softball

seagulls fly over the field

nine flapping white mitts

 

     frazzled groundskeeper

rolls the tarp across the field—

forty thousand rain checks

 

    right fielder grabs the carom

throws a long low rope to the plate

      —runner freezes at third

 

     sky high leg kick

ninety-five on the radar

    hitter sniffs at thin air

 

      back to the minors, rookie!

shouts the red-faced boobird—

      he wants his money back!

 

      bottom of the ninth

rookie hurler searches the stands –

      his dad behind the dugout

 

dusty Mexican ballfield

farmer’s kid swings a broomstick—

     a donkey brays strike one!

 

                 Kyoto sauna

ten sweaty men staring at the game

      on the steamy TV screen

 

      an old railroad depot

a young boy listens to the scores

     on the telegraph wire

 

     the Slammer launches one

over the trees by the train tracks—

     the whistle blows and blows

 

      ponytailed girl wraps

tape around her splintered bat

     hammers in five nails

 

 lusty cheers behind the dugout

   the on-deck hitter can’t take

            his eyes off her.

Phil Cousineau has published more than 40 books and written over 25 documentaries on topics ranging from art and music to travel and sports—including the Emmy-award winning  film, “Stealing Home.”  This is an excerpt from his book Fungoes and Fastballs: Great Moments in Baseball Haiku.

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