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Hearing a ball game on the radio recently said spring to me, as does any trip to Yankee stadium (now in its last season before demolition). In New York, the chatter about team injuries can take on a tribal intensity -- which is why I cracked Baseball Haiku: American and Japanese Haiku and Senryu on Baseball. Editor and translator Cor van den Heuvel is a haiku aficionado whose single-image poems capture moments from my own baseball-centered childhood, like these two:
baseball cards
spread out on the bed
April rain
biking to the field
under a cloudless sky
my glove on the handlebars
In George Swede's work, as is evident in the two here, the natural world interrupts and supercedes play, lending totemic power to things like dandelion seeds and sunbeams:
empty baseball field
a dandelion seed floats through
the strike zone
village ball game
