Diamond poetry

I'd forgotten than Donald Hall was one of Ken Burns's talking heads and narrative voices in that marvelous baseball documentary, until reading Hall's admission in Essays After Eighty that he was embarrassed by his inability to sing Take Me Out to the Ballgame for Burns in tune, on camera. But he sang beautifully all the same.

 

The Baseball Players

BY DONALD HALL

Against the bright

grass the white-knickered

players, tense, seize,

and attend. A moment

ago, outfielders

and infielders adjusted

their clothing, glanced

at the sun and settled

forward, hands on knees;

the pitcher walked back

of the hill, established

his cap and returned;

the catcher twitched

a forefinger; the batter

rotated his bat

in a slow circle. But now

they pause: wary, 

exact, suspended—

                                    while

abiding moonrise

lightens the angel

of the overgrown

hardens, and Walter Blake

Adams, who died

at fourteen, waits

under the footbridge.

Donald Hall, "The Baseball Players" from White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems, 1946-2006. Copyright © 2006 by Donald Hall.  Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Poetry Foundation