by Dick Altman
As if the fate of nations
hung in the balance,
World Cup enters its final laps.
Though it would bring a smile,
if my hometown America
took home the gold,
I neither hold my breath
nor torture myself
over the outcome.
Because, in my eyes, soccer
is less about winning,
than the friendships
that encircle the ball,
whatever color of foot,
language or nationality.
I motorcycle—
between grad school
and college—
across Europe.
On my luggage rack,
tied in a net,
a soccer ball.
On every beach,
every campsite,
the ball serves as the key
to a kingdom of friendships.
The night I visit Greece’s Delphi,
mythical home of the Oracle,
I doubt even she could
have predicted what would
happen as I slept.
Someone likely too poor
to own a ball of their own
burns—likely with a cigarette—
a hole in the net
and steals the ball.
This—after five-thousand
kilometers starting in Amsterdam.
I could only smile.
What they really stole
was the fun—and I,
kid of twenty-two,
on a fantasy trip
most my age
could only dream about,
could afford to share
a ball that would,
in days, months,
even years to come,
produce,
in every dribble and kick,
unyielding rounds of mirth.
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.