Sign for my Father, Who Stressed the Bunt

Sign for my Father, Who Stressed the Bunt by David Bottoms

On the rough cut diamond,
the hand-cut field below the dog lot and barn,
we rehearsed the strict techbique
of bunting. I watched from the infield,
the mound, the backstop
as your left hand climbed the bat, your legs
and shoulders squared toward the pitcher.
You could drop it like a seed
down either base line. I admired your style,
but not enough to take my eyes off the bank
that served as our center-field fence.

Years passed, three leagues of organized ball.,
now few lives. I could homer
into the garden beyond the bank,
into the left-field lot of Carmichael Motors,
and still you stressed the same technique,
the crouch and spring, the lead arm absorbing
just enough impact. That whole tiresome pitch
about basics never changing ,
and I never learned what you were laying down.

Like a hand brushed across the bill of a cap,
let this be the sign
I'm getting a grip on the sacrifice.

First I have to say that I love this poem because it is about baseball :)

So this poem is three stanzas long. The first has eleven lines, the second nine, and the third three. Nothing really stuck out to me when it came to structure, it was pretty straight forward.

The reason I llike this poem so much is that it teaches a very important life lesson through something that I can relate to. It teaches that scarifice is needed in order to gain something in life just like a scarifice bunt is needed to score more runs. I like how in the first stanza it talks about the hand made field that he played on, this kind of showed the scarfice his father made from him.