'Play up! play up!'

Poetry and sport have been linked since the times of the early Olympic Games. From the ancient Greek lyric poet Pindar's victory odes to John Betjeman's sexily English "A Subaltern's Love Song" ("What strenuous singles we played after tea, / We in the tournament – you against me! // Love-thirty, love-forty, oh! weakness of joy / The speed of a swallow, the grace of a boy . . ."), we can find poems on archery, baseball, cricket, darts, fishing (Elizabeth Bishop's monumental "The Fish") and so on. English poetry probably loves cricket best – interestingly, the sport we've had most success at this summer. Sir Henry Newbolt's "Vitai Lampada" ("Play up! play up! and play the game!") mourned the tragedy of war through the metaphor of schoolboy cricket and he came to resent the poem's use in propaganda. Wordsworth, Tennyson, Betjeman, Housman and Hughes have all written about cricket, and the master of the cricket poem today – and one of the finest British poets now writing – is Kit Wright, whose sublime "The Roller in the Woods" is included here. All of these new poems have been specially written by the poets for this feature, and I thank them hugely. We are, as usual, out of the World Cup and out of Wimbledon, so let's take the poems out into the garden with a glass of Pimm's and enjoy looking at what we're really good at. CAD Colette Bryce Great North Although we may have bolted from that sad cliff of our imminent decline, we are not Paula Radcliffe. And though we may have startled at the starting pistol, with its jolt of explosive (fired by Sting), Usain Bolt we are not, by a long shot. And even though we purchased the slim new book he called What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, we are not Haruki Murakami, most definitely not. Wired to our iPods, we are your average, middle-aged bipeds: half-trained, stiff-hinged, pegging up the course, as likely overtaken by a pantomime horse as a Lady Gaga . . . In the name of God! In the name of a small but worthy charity, we plod on, to the finish and vitality, fleeing those intimations of mortality. Gillian Clarke Pheidippedes' Daughter ( for Catrin ) Long silver girl who slipped easy and early from the womb's waters, whose child-breath was a bird in a cage, the inhaler in her fist her amulet, grew tall, beautiful, caught her breath, outran the hound, the hare, the myth, the otter, salmon, swallow, hawk, the river, the road, the track. She texts again – this time Santiago. She's counting seven cities underfoot, running the bloodlines of language, lineage, for Ceridwen's drop of gold, an ear of corn, to leave the Battle of Marathon and run through pain and joy with news to the gates of a city, to arrive at the finishing line, and say, " Nenikékamen – We have won." Billy Collins Night Golf I remember the night I discovered, lying in bed in the dark, that a few imagined holes of golf worked much better than a thousand sheep, that the local links, not the cloudy pasture with its easy fence, was the greener path to sleep. How soothing to stroll the shadowy fairways, to skirt the moon-blanched bunkers and hear the night owl in the woods. Who cared about the score when the club swung with the ease of air and I glided from shot to shot over the mown and rolling ground, alone and drowsy with my weightless bag? Eighteen small cups punched into the bristling grass, eighteen flags limp on their sticks in the silent, windless dark, but in the bedroom with its luminous clock and propped-open windows, I got only as far as the seventh hole before I drifted easily away – the difficult seventh, "The Tester" they called it, where, just as on the earlier holes, I tapped in, dreamily, for birdie. Wendy Cope Sporty People I took her for my kind of person And it was something of a shock When my new friend revealed That, once upon a time, She was a Junior County Tennis Champion. How could that happen? How could I accidentally Make friends with a tennis champion? How could a tennis champion Make friends with me? She wasn't stupid. She read books. She had never been mean to me For being bad at games. I decided to forgive Her unfortunate past. Sporty people can be OK – Of course they can. Later on, I met poets Who played football. It's still hard To get my head round that. Fred D'Aguiar A Sporting Chance If it's black you want then black you will get. Each sunrise a ball kicked from one end of a blue field Sails across to a black goal mouth and sinks into it and all The lights in the stadium plunge out, But the game never ends for another begins in a field On the opposite side of this bigger ball we are all pinned to Which responds to a giant kick as it spins around in an Even bigger blue field, a ball wary of a hot foot, gearing up So it seems, not for another kick, once and for all, More for a death-dealing embrace, As if a Euclidian dribble started eons ago Is brought to an instantaneous stop, A one-foot catch (not kick) and immediate burn up. I cannot help but think this with the World Cup When I hear about your lock up and the case Made against you by the giant state, I see this global football as you and the big foot Of the Big Bang wielded at us all is like the boot Swung at you that sends you into a black hole For a portion of your life that adds up to an embrace Of this oil-slicked planet by our sun in a starlit stadium; Black for you means black for me for kingdom come. Theo Dorgan All Ireland Final ( for Tom Humphries ) We stand for the anthem, buoyant and tribal, heart beating with heart, our colours brave, our faces turned towards the uncertain sun. The man beside me takes my hand: good luck to yours, he says; I squeeze his calloused palm and then – he's gone. A shadow socket where he was, the one beside him vanishes and another before me; all around Croke Park one by one we wink out of existence: tens, hundreds, then thousands, the great arena emptying out, the wind curling in from the open world to gather us all away. Each single one of us. I could feel myself fail at the end, but then maybe everyone thought that, each single one of us the last to go. The whistle blew and we all came back with a roar, everything brighter and louder, desperate and vivid. I held his hand a moment longer, I wished his team all the luck in the world. Nick Drake Ollamaloni ( Aztec: Rubber Ball Game ) I send you this report And risk your disbelief; In the stone stadium Of their temple of sacrifice Teams of very nearly naked men, Back to back, waited Until the crowd was silenced As at the Gloria of our Church When the Holy Spirit is invoked. What happened next defies All reason; I saw it spring from Nothing High across the sky, into the sun; At first I thought it was a wingless bird Spinning and vaulting in joy Like our swallows; but it fell to earth, Kissed the stone, and then leaped up again - The men gave chase, but the creature Tricked them, gathering speed With every bound, rising ever higher - The congregation roared, and I confess Tears poured down my face – I know not why; only my ardent faith Prevented me from stripping off My black soutane, and joining in the fray. In the spirit of enquiry I desired To hold the object of the game. They gave it to me. I have it now In the palm of my hand. It is a small, dark ball, warm As an egg, or a fallen star, And decorated with skulls; It is heavy as a stone, and yet What spirit moves it? Whose god Created such a wonder That leaps for joy? And why Does my body tremble with delight To play the game again? Pray for me, now – For I find I cannot let it go. Carol Ann Duffy The Shirt Afterwards, I found him alone at the bar and asked him what went wrong. It's the shirt, he said. When I pull it on it hangs on my back like a shroud, or a poisoned jerkin from Grimm seeping its curse onto my skin, the worst tattoo. I shower and shave before I shrug on the shirt, smell like a dream; but the shirt sours my scent with the sweat and stink of fear. It's got my number. I poured him another shot. Speak on, my son. He did. I've wanted to sport the shirt since I was a kid, but now when I do it makes me sick, weak, paranoid. All night above the team hotel, the moon is the ball in a penalty kick. Tens of thousands of fierce stars are booing me. A screech owl is the referee. The wind's a crowd, forty years long, bawling a filthy song about my Wag. It's the bloody shirt! He started to blub like a big girl's blouse and I felt a fleeting pity. Don't cry, I said, at the end of the day you'll be back on 100K a week and playing for City. Ian Duhig Square Ring ( for Tom Duhig ) A Sixties man thing: Dad, us, circling to bond as hard as Ingemar Johansson's glue in the ad around our huge box, its screen a snow globe of American static. The night Johansson won, a commentator summarised Floyd Patterson: feet of a ballet dancer, but chin of a poet . . . Floyd knocked out Ingemar in the rematch; his brilliant smile shone through his glass jaw. Brothers boxed: Mancinis, Coopers, Walkers – honest family fare. Abroad, Henry Cooper said you needed to knock out locals to get a draw. Yanks dived or swam in concrete boxing boots. Perhap my poet's foot is in my mouth now, Tom, former Middleweight Champion of the Royal Navy, but I most remember Freddie Mills sucking a rifle in the back of a car on his soul's darkest night. You might counter with Dick Tiger burning bright; bright enough to find words for "the blacklights", those galaxies only battered fighters can explore. Generous, Dick give away age, weight or height but never heart, slipping cannibal taunts to win; a Biafran civil warrior later yet, hero to both sides – another trick of boxing: it can also make more love. Square that ring, poet; brother, raise your hands. Ann Gray The wonder of you On Highbury Hill we took in bins and boarded up our windows. I knitted a romper suit in red and white Quickerknit and had a girl. Maureen's Grandma washed their strip. There's her photo leaning on the clothes' pole, a row of empty shorts on the line. We took our kids to see the horses, heard the roar for Charlie George, Bob Primrose Wilson. Football's faith, like you can't eat pork, you can't talk to Phil when Everton are losing. It's DNA, it's where you come from. My DNA's a mess. My dad demands respect but watches Charlton. One sister's lot are Hammers, the other married Liverpool. My brother and his barber walk to Chelsea. My boy went to Spurs. I took Beth when they were playing Wigan, we saw you know who from Big Brother Have you seen the size of her diamond? Did you see her shoes? Daws, Di-mi-ta Ber-ba-tov. Beth had his match shirt. I bought Baby Grace a treasure box for her first red curls. The only things in it are a programme and her first match ticket, 9 months old. Football's your wild child, you take out at week-ends, and you sing while the Gods perform their rituals; touch this boot first, touch that wall, touch the cross to the lips. The ref holds them back like horses, till you're wrung out, strung out, waiting for them to run out to Elvis, the wonder of you . Lavinia Greenlaw Kata A dance between movement and space, between image and imperative. Each step, an arrival of the familiar within the unknown. The gravity of form and the mechanism of each gesture as profound and dissolved as the body's memory of a stranger who said nothing but in passing met with you in stillness: wanting to go no faster than this. Philip Gross Goal One flash and no looking back, that moment, soundless, through the plate-glass frontage of the big-screen ( Catch The Big Game BIGGER! ) bar: some goal! has lifted them clean off their bar stools and out of themselves, their mouths wide, like one full-on gust of wind; there may be words and, somewhere, losers (in some mirror-image bar) but here, now, he's untouchable – one lad in the dozen, a tad doughy where his cheap kit top rides up, but hey, a good half-metre skyward as if hoisted by his high-flung fists – Ye-e-es! – launched like a toddler from a rough grip under armpits, as if gravity had shrugged and dad's glasspaper grin could be always below, great laughter like God's, without words in any language, without rights or wrongs or sides to fall back into. Why else can we dream of flying, unless we were made for this? Paul Henry Boy Running ( for Ioan ) The canal tilts him back and fore like a boat in a toy pen or the bubble in a spirit-level that never quite finds its middle. There are worse ways to grow tall under the rustling sun and rain between bridges 14 and 21 to outlive an owl, a drake, a hawk where no two leaves blow the same way and pumpkin lanterns moor for the night. Run, boy running, run past the sighing old man and his blind Labrador, the foal in her wire necklace. Run, between east and west, spring and autumn, dawn and dusk. Is it your breath now or mine deep inside your chest? There are worse ways to never settle in full flight, to be loved. Run, my shadow, run. Run but always stay in sight. An owl cries, deep inside the trees. The canal's glass is full of moonlight. Adam Horovitz Training Run ( for Ashley Loveridge ) Linear. Beyond lines. Path swallowed by the mare's tail flick of cow parsley. Your feet pound out the hollowed laughter of this discarded canal. A sparse lee in the woods jolts you awake, out of the hammered dream of the run; it writhes with the scent of rain, aches under a blanket of wild garlic, sun. You have bitten, sharp as an arrow, into the low heat of the dusk, the deep focus, the valley's marrow. The world is a husk until you run it, until you find your way over nettle creep, cow dung, hard-trodden clay. Alan Jenkins Great Sporting Moments, Vol LV A brace of goals that I was meant to score, Aged ten – how else can I explain them? Taken on the run Or on the turn, from outside the eighteen-yard box. The last-minute try that means we have won – My first game for the big school's first fifteen – except The full-time whistle has already gone. (I blunder on Through their bewildered backs . . .) The catch I take so deep in the outfield it almost knocks me Backwards over the boundary. Last man out. End of match. I can still see myself, skinny legs in baggy khaki shorts, Forehand-drive my way through the singles draw Against the white-clad ones on the tennis-club courts And hurtle towards the crossbar that day I leapt Into the record-book . . . How reliable these moments are That I replay endlessly! But all the same it shocks me, To think that I was once that little star, So lean and taut and primed – the boy who mocks me; How brief the main event, through which I must have slept. Glyn Maxwell Brief History of Sport Granted that your guess is as good as mine Here's mine. It happened like this in a vale in sunshine Or moonshine. What it was was one was gone Over the star- or sun-lit same horizon Gone, one gone whom we fear, we being some Who bide with our sheep and our sons in a land of some. There was one long gone whom we fear, so a son we love Went off in pursuit as fast and not fast enough As he could, to the far horizon, was seen there Hurling his spear at one long gone, we were out there Watching him, he would hurry and hurl his spear, Follow it, find it, step with it high and from there Hurl it at one long gone till will please someone Tell him? Still he's hurling his spear at no one. Sticking a stick like a stake on the horizon To build on, to build what on, wondered someone As we carried his body back, he was as light as A light on the horizon, he was fine as We could frame the words for, we were delving Deep for them, we piled them all then nothing Over the hole we dug him, and we stood there Three, we stood there three, and we were good there – Or one was good, I should say, and you were better – But I was best at wishing this day had never Been, they brought me gold and you silver And I sold it to live far from you, where over And over the rain rains spears on the fist-thick panes And your prayer is as good as mine unless mine wins. Paul Muldoon Chunkey A game about which we've got next to nothing straight, it seems to have been a mash-up of buzkashi and road bowls. As I try to anticipate a spear-thrower trying to anticipate the spot where the chunkey-stone rolls to a standstill, I hear a ten thousand strong shout go up over the abandoned chunkey-yard at Cahokia, in support, maybe, of the idea Cahokia will win out. Maybe we should accept our understanding must fall short as a spear falls short of this sandstone disk some take to represent the sun. Maybe we should accept our grand ambitions as grandiose and our aversion to averting risk merely rash. Maybe we should support the idea that having won will mean merely "to have come close." Michael Symmons Roberts Lines Composed on the Occasion of Manchester United's Champions League Defeat by Bayern Munich in April 2010 Slo-mo saves our season. Here's how: that dissembling volley, sucker punch, repays a replay. From the corner, run it slow; see match-ball turn to damson on his foot, swell as if too ripe, then shimmer back into its shape. Watch the sickly fruit fall sideways waist-high, and our keeper's weightless, fruitless dive begin with arms raised like a saint in rapture. Replay slower: thirty million eyes draw the ball onto his laces. Left foot becomes fulcrum, weighs up past and future. Slower: geological, the shift of leather against leather. This way faults are formed, continents are realigned forever. Slower: keeper leans, ball will never come, the tie cannot be lost, victory songs are stuck on note one, hum, on om . This frame is now pitch-perfect: ball rests on boot like a hawk called to glove, and what this says about impact is that when you run it slow enough to witness, each kick begins in equipoise, and every knockout punch is a caress. Matthew Sweeney The Lost Gold Medal Munich Olympics 1972: there should have been an Irish gold medal to go with Ronnie's from Melbourne in 1956, my birth-year, give or take four. The sport? Push-penny, or push-halfpenny, as it had to be then, with a 2p banging a ½ p on a draughtsman's board, the coins pinged by steel combs towards goals marked in black pen. These decimal coins were new in, and each wore a bird in a Celtic knot design, stolen from the Book of Kells. Zoom in to UCD in 1971, the testing ground. Those old Georgian buildings on Earlsfort Tce. The pride of the Engineering Faculty at battle in private, till a university-wide championship was flagged up all over the sprawling campus, with entries coming in from Classics, English, Law, you name it, all of them plonkers, using plastic combs, credit cards, nailfiles, sawnoff rulers . . . They entered like non-league clubs in the FA Cup and unlike those, none of them prospered. Cut to the semi-finals on a hot Friday in May, not long after L'Escargot's second Gold Cup. Three of the players were Engineering, one Architecture, all men, the bulk of the fans women. One match ended goalless, went to penalties, the other ended 3:0, and that was me in the final where I met my longhaired, moustachioed friend who bet he'd beat me. Some chance! I scored early, then sat back, catenaccio , warding off all attacks till I scored again, with a viciously spinning free-kick, after which my goalmouth had a wall. Hoisted up, and carried, with cheers, to the pub where a letter was drafted to the Irish Olympic Committee, insisting it get push-penny added to the Games so Ireland would win another gold. As Google and History show, it didn't happen but I'm still here, if in need of practice, I have two mad, green shirts and green shoes, draughtsman's boards must be cheap on eBay, and I think the Mexicans still make steel combs. Kit Wright The Roller in the Woods Who would imagine a cricket ground Had ever existed here, Folded into a farm on the downland pasture, Lapping the edge of the oakwood And the buttercup-quilted rides? For the Toll is returned to plough After a century of combat, Sown to a sea of blue-green waves Beneath which it lies drowned. And now, Stick nor stone of the old pavilion, Hook nor slat of the scoreboard left: Never an echo of tumbling children, Tattle of Edwardians, Knocking their pipes out on the rough deal benches. Foaming hawthorn and rhododendron Have colonised the field-edge, spreading Through copper beech and flowering chestnut And adventitious saplings. Where Is the camaraderie Of the side I played for so often here: Their thunderous blows and heroical overs, The days that flowed with sun and wind: Stalemates in dismal drizzle, And the finger of death uplifted in the dusk? Where, I might ask, Are Nobby and Dave and the Colonel and Phil, The two Pauls and the one and only Moggy Worsfold and Arthur Spark? I have failed to raise them By staring out at the level meadow As if I were Cadmus who had sown The dragon's teeth and awaited His armed men springing from the earth. But I did untangle my way Through the canopied darkness of what had been The boundary. Among the laurel bushes And snagging goose-grass and rabbit holes, I found what I'd forgotten, hidden Under a wide oak. For this Was what they could not lightly move In the rhythm of abandonment: Here was the deep ground-bass and the solemn Measure of constancy, foundry-born, That had lasted so long. And I laid My arms across the surface, feeling Under the rust and dust and pollen, The summers that never seemed to move And all the years gone by to the creak of iron.