Football Poets

An August Welcome …. and goodbye

Forgive me a little indulgence (see further below).

In August 2004, we welcome the following first time contributors to the Football Poets website (granted – some may be pseudonyms, there’s a certain familiarity about some of the styles!) :

Richard Vaughan, Sean Jamieson, Clive Robert, Laurie Hall, Paddy McMahon, Brendan O’Brien, Terry Kennedy, Samantha Brown, Kenneth Hoffman, Ray Kyte.

This month, I’ve selected :

Missed Penalty

Why won’t the ground open up
NOW
Bury me
Hide me
Right here
Leave me with the dust of my dreams
As the knives of the terrace
Pierce my shirt
And lie embedded between
The name and number
On the back.

© Paddy McMahon

My little indulgence?
Before today, I’d never heard of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature winner, Czeslaw Milosz.

But then I came across some of his poems (nothing whatsoever to do with football), but they moved me, with a passion.
And inspired the two following poems.

For anybody who may be interested;
Czeslaw Milosz was born in Lithuania, on 30th June 1911, into a Polish heritage.
He moved to Paris in 1931, then spent many years in Poland.
In 1960 he emigrated to the USA.
He died August 14th, 2004.

The following two poems were inspired by reading Czeslaw, but certainly don’t do justice to his genius .

Meaning

When I die
Will I find the meaning of life?
When I cross over to the other side
(No, not in that sense;
the Red Devils won’t get me, for I’ll always be a true Blue)
Will I be enlightened, as to the purpose of our existence?
Will there be a clarity, in what was a darkness of being?
Will there finally, be a comprehension of the new offside interpretation?
Will there be some sense, to the many years, of misguided loyalty
Of the devotion given over to, a bunch of under-achievers?
Will there be some grasp
As to why this fetid fixation
Could so move me and make me gasp?
Will it be proven, that this magnificent obsession
Was not a life wasted, or lost
But a mystical possession?

When I die
There’ll be another such as I?

note :
inspired by a poem called Meaning,
written by Czeslaw Milosz (1911 – 2004).

Jesus and football

He nailed it
Met the cross
And buried it

So that we might live
And breathe
And roar out his name

Blasphemy
Unbecoming
Of our Passion

note :
inspired by (but very different to),
a poem called ‘A Poem For The End Of The Century’ –
written by Czeslaw Milosz (1911 – 2004).

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