Cricket

Here is how elemental it is. Still, today, I will sometimes be walking along on the road or driving somewhere, and I will be muttering under my breath the stream of consciousness monologue that I speak while batting. The entire monologue is an act of deep concentration, a game of trying to read the bowler, trying to predict his next move, trying to psyche myself up to deal with each ball bowled…
And yet, I have written very few poems about cricket...

There are no clouds, the wicket is tough—Head, thegrounds man, did a good job, it is baked hard and shining, no grass, the ball will bounce evenly—clear sky, clear sky, here he comes… first ball—the runs will come, the runs will come, no rush… Okay, okay, he is going to come with a short and fast one now. It will be fast because the ball is brand new. It will go wide, of course, but if by some fluke he manages to bring it in, just put the bat down on it, Kwame, don’t swing, just kill it, kill it. Here he comes--remember to move that foot back, back, just before he comes up to the crease, back, and then wait to see if it is short. It will be short, be ready, be ready for it to pop up, take it in the chest if you must. Four slips—they think he is fast, no mid-wicket, no fine leg—they think he won’t stray, they think I won’t hook, but if he is short, if he is short… No, Kwame, short or not, don’t rush it, just test it, see what he has.. he will be short, just kill it, just kill it…
Then the split second of action. The ball comes through, it is short, it rises sharply, I shuffle my foot further back and take hard it on the gloves of the bat. It drops to the ground. My fingers smart. I walk away from the ball, swing my bat, look around the field, slap my pad with the bat, tap into the ground, all the time talking, talking…
They can’t see you are hurt. It’s not broken, don’t let them know. Stay focused, stay tough. He is quick, but if he shorts like that again. I am going to hook, I can hook this guy… But he won’t drop short again. The next one will be up, probably too up, and it will probably be on the middle, because the first was on target, he is accurate, he knows what to do. He is going to try to surpriseyou with a full length ball; this one is going to come right up the pitch, so you have to watch it, Kwame, watch for the yorker, push that foot back, only a bit, then slide forward, and then open the bat—if he is in your pads you can make this a good on-drive… but you are not looking for runs now, no runs, yet, just stay out there, the runs will come, the runs will come.
I have not written enough poems about cricket.
The bowler arrives, the ball is full length as predicted, and on the leg, I push my front foot out, then lean over the ball, pushing the bat against it so it hits the fleshy middle, it feels tender and sweet, and the ball shoots quickly from the bat and starts to make, at a quick pace, its way along the ground towards the on-side boundary while a fielder chases, and the two of us start to run, quickly at first, calling “One!”, “Come again!” for two, and so on. Now I am breathless. But I keep talking, I keep talking, for ball after ball.
I can still do this. I still do it in my head, completely engrossed, replaying actual games that I played thirty years ago. It is quite unsettling to think that I have managed to store in my head such mundane and quite un-useful details.
I say all of this to say that cricket is very important to me, and yet I have written so few cricket poems.
I have written a few poems about cricket, but not enough. After all, one should write about the things that one is passionate about. But I have not written enough about cricket, a game about which I am very passionate. Or maybe, I am not passionate enough about the game—not anymore, anyway. Perhaps, I used to be passionate about the game, very passionate.
My sense of self was defined by the success of the West Indies cricket team. I played the game, coached the game, followed the game. But since I have been in America, I have not been able to follow the game. And since I have been in America, perhaps because of my failure to pay attention to the game, the West Indies team, which as late as 1987, was touted as a juggernaut that would continue to reign over world cricket for the next two decades, is now competing for the position of ordinary and unremarkable team among a crowd of others. It may be my fault. And since they are losing, I may have lost my passion. But it has to be more than that. It is distance. It is the fact that I am away from the game. I live in a country where cricket does not really exist.
So I have written very few poems about cricket.
I could start to do that. But who would read it? I do have a British readership and a Caribbean readership, but the truth is that the audience I meet most often are my US readers. And most of them would not know what to do with cricket metaphors. Few would get the point, and my readings would be quite odd in an irrelevant sort of you.
Which is why I fear I am becoming somebody else living in America. I am giving something up, something as elemental as cricket.
The only useful answer is that I have found a new audience, and I have somehow, unconsciously, and yet, calculatedly, managed to shape my work around this audience. There is something impure, something unessential, something seemingly crass about this confession. I am left wondering what else I have abandoned for America; I wonder what else I have discarded so I can be a poet in America. And how bad is this? How serious a failure is this of my art?
Last night I looked at a cricket DVD that featured cricketers from the 1980s. I could feel all the emotions returning to my body, the familiarity of my excitement at the game, the swell of anticipation of knowing I am about to play or watch the game, the pleasurable and unreasonable sensation of knowing that I could spend all day just watching this slow colonial game unfold ball after ball. There is a language to the game, a discourse, a sense of self. I have lost much of that.
And these are some of the losses of migration. But the art of writing should help the immigrant to retain those pleasures, those defining elements of their lives. I must write a few poems about cricket. I must.