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Stadiums of Light – a Sunderland memory

Adam Horovitz

Tuesday, December 11th, 2001

1 Leave a comment on verse 1 0 I still hear the ebb and plunge
of 1980s vintage Roker Roar

2 Leave a comment on verse 2 0 booming like the winter tide around my skull
as I played marbles outside, too young

3 Leave a comment on verse 3 0 and too poor to get in on my own.
The names of players are far away and lost,

4 Leave a comment on verse 4 0 obscured by the effervescent sheen of Quinn,
or Phillips, hammering home a goal,

5 Leave a comment on verse 5 0 but watching the team play now, on TV, alone,
I remember the post-match exuberance of whole

6 Leave a comment on verse 6 0 tribes of men retreating from a week of work,
careering pubwards and in full song,

7 Leave a comment on verse 7 0 recession biting, but not yet drawing blood,
who’d buy me lemonades or kets and use the public phone

8 Leave a comment on verse 8 0 to call their bookies if the result was right.
I’d cycle home on sugar-powered wheels,

9 Leave a comment on verse 9 0 high on the stories of the day’s success,
dreaming my own version of the match

10 Leave a comment on verse 10 0 and building up, with stickers, pens and paint,
my own, imaginary, stadiums of light.

© Adam Horovitz 2001

Notes

Kets was/is a Sunderland dialect word for sweets.

Source: http://footballpoets.org/poems/stadiums-of-light-a-sunderland-memory/