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The Goal Net

S B Ingle

Thursday, March 8th, 2007

1 Leave a comment on verse 1 0 Flutters like an abandoned spiders web
Tattered fishnet of broken threads
Faded streamers limply hang
Memorabilia in lofts across the land
Teams disbanded, lives moved on
Those artless times long gone

2 Leave a comment on verse 2 0 Council officials obliterate fun
Red tape prefers parking spaces
To open green places
Facilities go unmaintained
Playing fields lost to citizens pain

3 Leave a comment on verse 3 0 Close your eyes and imagine
The crowd cheering, five kids and a dog
You can hear that shot hit the post
(Still puncturing balls, four-legged Fang, now a ghost)
Then you score the winner
Before going home for dinner
Waving an invisible Cup

4 Leave a comment on verse 4 0 Let’s hear it for snagged toilet rolls thrown
For long remembered goals
Jumpers for goalposts – now outgrown

© S B Ingle 7.3.07

Notes

Revisted a park near my childhood home at the weekend, where I used to have a kickabout with other kids from the estate. The park is now chocolate fudge mud, burnt out hedges and all that grows in the once splendid formal rose beds is despair.

Memories though, are not neglected, and shine brighter than any trophy.

As does hope. There, beyond the broken net, in the mud, was a kid
practising his free-kicks, over and over…

Source: http://footballpoets.org/poems/the-goal-net/