This poem is not about Strawberry Fields of Beatles fame
Nor about Daryl Strawberry’s tape measure baseball blasts
It’s about my encounters with baseball’s strawberry slashes
emerging after my initial little league slide into second base.
Persistent strawberry scars have tattooed me from my eighth to my eighteenth year
These ragged baseball bruises are colorful and weirdly artistic
They tattooed my legs with multiple shapes: oval, round, triangular, dotted, and jagged.
They revealed themselves after stubborn baseball slides, steals, leaps ,and dives.
They never discriminated in terms of specific placement on legs:
right knee, left knee, or both.
As a little league player, I’d sported strawberries as badges of honor
similar to battle scarred jackets hanging in my local Army Navy store.
Many of us shared this history.
I competed with teammates boasting about our most intriguing and unique wounds
Grimacing, with teeth clenched after injury, I sprinted to my mom.
She raised her brows instructing while bandaging and demonstrating
how to disinfect the wound with painless doses; Mercurochrome of course.
She attached what resembled a dishcloth sized bandage
Cradling my face in my hands I endured mom’s minor surgery.
I got lost in my thoughts wildly wondering how many of these baseball strawberries
had slashed Jackie Robinson, my heroic number 42.
Surely his must have been as larger than lemons.
Fortunately, strawberries temporarily abandoned me after my last high school game.
They made cameo appearances at senior softball games and family picnic challenges.
Many summers later, the strawberries reappeared
at the Detroit Tiger Senior Fantasy Camp following a hard slide.
I looked at the bleachers for a moment and smiled imagining
that Ty Cobb had experienced that same moment on that exact spot.
A score of years later, unwelcome ghosts of past baseball strawberries resurrected and revisited my knees.
A testament to my madness of jogging on a cruise ship, a rogue wave rocked me, shaking me like a mixed drink in the aggressive hands of an experienced bartender.
My left knee immediately smooched with the sweaty ship’s deck and unveiled the birth of new baseball strawberry.
Limping toward my cabin, I slammed its door open and remembered my mother’s teaching tips, and started to gently clean this latest wound.
Hours later, while digging into what looked like a ruler tall strawberry sundae,
I wiped my mouth relishing a heavenly sweet taste on my lips.
I vowed that from that moment on these delicious treats would become my strawberry of choice.
THE POETRY OF THE GAME