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Talent

Brenda Read-Brown

Wednesday, March 7th, 2001

1 Leave a comment on verse 1 0 She is hungry for young men.
She is the only lonely woman
In the local park on Sundays,
Watching soccer badly played.
She has gladly paid this price of time,
Not for the free kicks of the football fan –
Her goal is different;
She’s looking for a man.

2 Leave a comment on verse 2 0 Sometimes an older player sees her,
Takes the chance to tease a young full-back:
“You could get her in the sack,
“Mate, bet you’d give her one;
“Older women? Gagging for it, son!
“She’s dying for a shagging, lad, look,
“You can see the signs!”
It’s just a few more lines
In the sad book of men’s fun,
But the youngest player blushes,
Says “Fuck off”, and rushes off
To chase a ball, and follow fantasies, and dreams
Of unlaced passions that might rage
With a woman twice his age,
Nearly.
It seems merely
A game, to him,
But the deadly flame of just-grown limbs and faces
Draws her to places where he’d play;
A willing prey
To need, she hunts him, with a stalker’s eye,
Blind to families walking by with dogs,
And the young woman who jogs
Round the pitch, her gaze is fixed
On the bodies of maturing boys;
Ears shut to the haze of sporty noise –
Grunts and thuds and distant whistles –
She just wants to meet her match,
Searching for dark hair and half-shaved bristles,
Hoping that today she’ll catch his eye,
And in this injured time they’ll know,
Together, the reflection she last saw
In a young child’s face, all those years before,
When she had to let him go.

3 Leave a comment on verse 3 0 His father played on this park, too,
And she used to watch him then,
So she comes back, again and again,
Scouting not for talent, but for the winning moment when
With a joy no footballer has known,
She can be sure that she has seen
The boy, the son who was her own.
He would be seventeen.

Notes

I’m not what you’d call a feminist, but March 8th is International Women’s Day, so….
a poem with a woman, and football, seemed appropriate.

Source: http://footballpoets.org/poems/talent/