by Dick Altman
 |
| "Ball players," a hand-colored lithograph by George Catlin (1796-1872) |
Thud!
Thud!
Thud!
The sound
of a solid rubber
lacrosse ball
slamming
into my chest
at 90 mph.
I’m a goalie.
By game’s end
the ball tattoos
red impact circles
all over ribs
and thighs
Everyone
a “save”.
*
Cayuga
Mohawk
Oneida
Onondaga
Seneca
Tuscarora
Syllables poetic
of the Iroquois.
Now known as
Haudenosaunee.
Hoe-dee-no-SHOW-
nee, to my ear,
almost a poem
unto itself.
Haudenosaunee.
Star-strewn lacrosse
team that hopes—
and I share them—not
merely to win six years
from now Olympic gold.
But to trumpet
in the game’s balletic
clash and flow—
of stick on stick,
stick on flesh—
Native America’s
presence—resilient,
enduring—as I want
to imagine it
in the wider world.
*
I write this poem for you,
you of First Nations,
to acknowledge
what a privilege
it was to dance
in your ancestors’
footsteps.
To play one of your
magical stringed
instruments, whose
music lets me subdue
strikes in mid-flight.
Bladed ball of poetry
that writes across
my body its wounds.
*
I stand fifty years later
in front of the mirror.
If I look closely, I can
see fine broken blood
vessels, not of age,
but joy of deflecting
one more shot on goal.
One more Thud! of joyful
pain, to rhapsodize over
a lifetime.
Dick Altman writes in the high, thin, magical air of Santa Fe, NM, where,at 7,000 feet, reality and imagination often blur. He is published in Santa Fe Literary Review, American Journal of Poetry, riverSedge, Fredericksburg Literary Review, Foliate Oak, Blue Line, THE Magazine, Humana obscura, The Offbeat, Haunted Waters Press, Split Rock Review, The RavensPerch, Beyond Words, The New Verse News, Sky Island Journal, and others here and abroad. A poetry winner of Santa Fe New Mexican’s annual literary competition, he has in progress two collections of some 100 published poems. His work has been selected for the forthcoming first volume of The New Mexico Anthology of Poetry to be published by the New Mexico Museum Press.
