Photo by Max Hirshfeld
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The South Bronx
We lived in the land of broomsticks
stickball played between cars
manholes for bases
We ran past fire hydrants
and caught balls near curbs
Now and then someone smacked
a Spaldeen to a rooftop—
Making pigeons fly
Fences
In the playgrounds
there were few left-handed
hitters so right field
is where the big kids placed us.
We became ghosts of the game.
We stood alone in sunlight.
Sometimes during a third out
we escaped through a hole in the fence.
We returned home like players sent down
to the minors.
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E. Ethelbert Miller is a literary activist and author of two memoirs and several poetry collections. He hosts the WPFW morning radio show On the Margin with E. Ethelbert Miller and hosts and produces The Scholars on UDC-TV, which received a 2020 Telly Award. Miller’s latest book, If God Invented Baseball (City Point Press), was awarded the 2019 Literary Award for poetry by the American Library Association’s Black Caucus. (See The E. Ethelbert Miller Papers.)
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