Geoff Page: Two Poems

Sweaty Maxims

after Rio

 

Sport, we know, is filled with morals

even when it’s out and drunk.

Consider all the holy homework

behind the basketballer’s dunk.

 

Think upon the codes of football,

each a sublimated war.

Chopped-up chess or riot with rules?

Choose your own sweet metaphor.

 

Swimming, too, is sleek with meaning.

Life a fifty-metre dash?

Or thirty chlorinated lengths

more for honour than the cash?

 

Reflect upon the “sport of kings”,

galloping or pulling wheels.

No matter whose nag’s out the front

a bookie shares in its ideals.

 

Athletics too are rich in precepts.

A marathon will test your soul—

along with javelins and hammers

or soaring skyward on a pole.

 

That happy zen of bats and racquets

is mastered by an agile few

whose coaches rabbit on about

the need for speed and “follow-through”.

 

“Try, try, try again,”

my unasked mother used to say.

I’m up to here with sweaty maxims.

Can they be paid to go away?

Geoff Page

 

 

 

The Mariner

Mark Snyders 1925–2016

He talked about his years at sea,

the wheelhouse and the stars,

the routes between the continents,

the ports and harbour bars,

the midnight watch, the solitude,

the camaraderie,

the sea lanes newly swept of mines,

the countries now set free.

The manifests were part of it,

a quarter-master’s roll.

He’d seen the dolphins surge at dawn,

the flying fish in shoals

the hurricanes which generate

those mountains of the sea,

the doldrums too from which the sun

climbs reassuringly.

He left the sea—but never quite.

His interests came ashore.

He married, raised two children but

the sea was at the core.

He built a cliff-top house to watch

the shoulders of the tide.

His import/exports dipped and rose

until his first wife died.

I knew him in his later years,

still gazing at the sea

and grateful for a late and new

connubiality.

With love, the end was easier.

He bore its rigours well,

staring from a captain’s height

across an ocean’s swell.

He saw the wake his life had left,

the limits that apply;

then one night broke away and sailed

towards a line of sky.

Geoff Page