Today’s Poem: The Pitcher’s Arm

I see the boys of summer in their ruin

Thomas Eakins, Baseball Players Practicing, 1875 (Wikimedia Commons)

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The Pitcher’s Arm

by Benjamin Myers

To find the saplings lanky in the field,
awkwardly stretched toward flat, indifferent sun,
growing through anthills, sparse grass, and earth peeled
bare by high wind; to find the seedlings run
down by the mower blade and tossed aside,
the piles of brush, cut sycamore and oak,
heaped up against the summer’s waxing tide
of yellowed grass in air as furred as smoke;
is finding something out about almost,
not quite, and could have been: the pitcher’s arm
grown heavy in the minor leagues, the ghost
of young glory sent back to haunt the farm.
The world is crammed with what’s not there, not quite,
as saplings rise to die in gold-flecked light.

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In 1934, Dylan Thomas (1914–1953) published “I see the boys of summer,” the first poem in his first book of poetry. “I see the boys of summer in their ruin,” it opens, “Lay the gold tithings barren, / Setting no store by harvest.”

Hard to say exactly what precisely any of the poems in Thomas’s 18 Poems is about, but his phrasings are always evocative, and in 1972, the sportswriter Roger Kahn (1927–2020) used the poem for the title and epigraph of his book about the 1952–1953 Brooklyn Dodgers, The Boys of Summer, one of the great sports books ever written.

Even Kahn couldn’t exhaust the association of dying summer and aging ballplayers, however, and the poet Benjamin Myers (b. 1975) has recently returned to the theme with Today’s Poem, “The Pitcher’s Arm.” It’s a Shakespearian sonnet — pentameter lines, rhymed abab-cdcd-efef-gg, mostly iambic but with several lines opening with an initial trochee: “bare by high wind,” “heaped up against.”

The poem appeared in the first issue, Summer 2024, of a new poetry journal called New Verse Review — and in celebration of the appearance of the journal, Poems Ancient and Modern offers Today’s Poem. Founded by our occasional guest columnist Steven Knepper, the journal is dedicated to “work that renews the ancient affinities among poetry, song, and story.” And it’s friendly to poems in traditional verse forms along with narrative poetry (as championed by Mark Jarman and Robert McDowell in their Reaper Essays of the 1980s). The inaugural issue features work by many friends of Poems Ancient and Modern, including Maryann Corbett, Len Krisak, Amit Majmudar, Victoria Moul, James Matthew Wilson, Zara Raab, Sally Thomas, and J.S. Absher — and Benjamin Myers.

Benjamin Myers

A professor at Oklahoma Baptist University, Myers was the 2015-2016 Poet Laureate of the State of Oklahoma and has published four books of poetry. In “The Pitcher’s Arm” he builds an image of a fallow field, after having been left to itself for a season, being mowed down as the days grow colder, “the summer’s waxing tide.” The saplings that sprouted there are “lanky,” and so, presumably, was a young baseball prospect.

But now, his arm failing and his prospects fading, he finds that he was an almost, a not quite, at best a could have been. He’s been sent down to “haunt the farm” (and Myers plays on the word farm as both a farmstead and the farm teams in the minor leagues for which he played). And as the field is mown down, we are “finding something out” — for “The world is crammed with what’s not there, not quite, / as saplings rise to die in gold-flecked light.”

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