Yahtzee: My Poem: Mean Pitch: Gen

[stonepicnicking_okapi]

Title: Mean Pitch
Poetic form: English sonnet
Number of Lines: 14
Word Count: 99
Rating: Gen
Prompt: mean
Summary: a sonnet about an abandoned football/soccer field [inspired by photo below]

it’s a mean pitch. it’s lacking distinction
from fields abandoned only by faint line
it’s dull and almost worn to extinction
by discrimination like turpentine

it’s a mean pitch. contemptible and poor,
of sparse and spartan grass, of no regard,
its scars, by undignified force majeure,
are old, common, dishonorable, hard

fresh teams of evil might’ve played there once
so long ago no one remembers well
spikes scourging soil while all the world played dunce
and tournaments were held at hell’s own hell

it’s a mean pitch. a dead deserted pyre
where hangs a rusted whistle on barbed wire.

Comments

[smallhobbit]

Great sonnet for the photo - quite evocative.

[stonepicnicking_okapi]

Thank you! I do think it's a great photo and 'mean' seemed to work well. And, well, I've got a bank holiday weekend soccer tournament to get through coming up and I was thinking about dark forces have once played on a now deserted pitch.

[debriswoman]

This fits the prompt so well, and conjures up all sorts of grim images re the history of the pitch.

[stonepicnicking_okapi]

Thanks! Yes, the barbed wire and the rusted whistle and the sort of desolate pitch. Ominous in a retro sort of way. 'Bad things happened here.'