Poetry from Thailand

Original poetry written in and about rural Thailand.

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Location: Chong Khae, Nakhonsawan, Thailand

Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Silence



At eight I had a collection
of cracked bats my father
brought home from the town’s
hard ball team.  The cracks
looked like whale mouths'
as they followed the grain down
from the barrel to the handle
and then back up again. 
In the middle of the crack my father
would put in a wood screw and
wrap it in black electrical tape.

The bats were too heavy for
me to swing in a game even if
I choked-up, but on those empty
days of boyhood when I was as lonely
as a farm boy, I would hit rocks toward
the woods across the street with these
bats the same way my father hit fungos
to outfielders.

I hit so many rocks over the summer
that the bat barrels began to look like
Shredded Wheat.  But by the end of
August, I could toss up a rock and
take a couple drum-major quick steps
toward it and catch the rock in
a cosmic vortex of gravity and
spin that in my mind’s eye looked
like orbits of sparklers on the night of the 4th.

My rock hitting didn’t really end badly,
but it ended when I hit a rock so well
that it cleared the house-lot sized field,
cleared the top of the Green Monster
forest beyond, and . . . broke a window.
I listened for someone screaming,
but there was no sound.

There was no roaring crowd, no “Wait
until next year,” just a silence that
haunts me to this day.

FG  Aug. 1, 2012

All right reserved by the author Forrest Greenwood.