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Old Fashioned but Post-Modernist

Stuart Butler

Tuesday, December 23rd, 2003

1 Leave a comment on verse 1 0 It was a grey sky winter solstice late afternoon,
When our train stopped at Kemble,
And a fashionable young man got on,
With an old fashioned football scarf
Knotted around his neck,
Alternate horizontal bars of black and white,
The sort of scarf that knew who it supported,
But kept its secret secret;
No slogans, no names, no pack drill,
No written history of past victories and triumphs,
Just a quiet, polite, complacent scarf,
With no in your face assertion of self,
But instead the possibility of multiple identities,
Newcastle? Notts County? Luton? Fulham? Tottenham?
It seemed too rude to ask,
And he might not have been a football fan at all;
Fortunately, Stroud was the next station,
And off I got, none the wiser,
But ready for the next narrative,
Shopping.

© Stuart Butler

Source: http://footballpoets.org/poems/old-fashioned-but-post-modernist/