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The Beautiful Game

1 Leave a comment on verse 1 0 5. The Beautiful Game

2 Leave a comment on verse 2 0 Football is art’s reflection of oneness

3 Leave a comment on verse 3 0 In a world of divisions; of beauty’s truth

4 Leave a comment on verse 4 0 Leaping muscle-bound fouls; the dreams of youth

5 Leave a comment on verse 5 0 Without its injured ordinariness

6 Leave a comment on verse 6 0 Or age’s silting of its genius;

7 Leave a comment on verse 7 0 The Best without its thickening uncouth

8 Leave a comment on verse 8 0 Slurred self-disgrace or bruising disproof

9 Leave a comment on verse 9 0 By yobs in boots; the angel dance of studs:

10 Leave a comment on verse 10 0 – Like Pele’s pass, to gift a certain goal

11 Leave a comment on verse 11 0 He’d made his own, to some more mortal bloke

12 Leave a comment on verse 12 0 He knew without a call or look was there;

13 Leave a comment on verse 13 0 Or Maradonna’s goal, that turned a whole

14 Leave a comment on verse 14 0 Defence, a childhood’s poverties, to air

15 Leave a comment on verse 15 0 More light than hand of God or head of coke.

Notes

I wrote the poem because it strikes me that football really does strive for beauty and perfection in the very places where ugliness, disappointment and yobbery mass their forces. Pele made ballet not on a ballet stage but where it matters, in the midst of thuggery; Maradonna’s second goal v England achieved for real the very thing he had cheated everyone, including his own genius, to achieve with that “hand of God”. George Best the player was the very genie he wrecked himself seeking in that bottle. If this kind of thing interests you, I would love to hear from you via my website www.garethcalway.co.uk

Source: http://footballpoets.org/poems/the-beautiful-game-2/