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Poets and artists

Spot the ball

When I was ten years old
Dad gave us five crosses each,
once a week.
I drew mine like the hairs in a telescopic sight,
shooting blind for a moving target;
Mum's were a gentle flock of starlings
winging across the stadium,
and Dad made a formation of far away Spitfires
that patrolled the tiny halftones.

With biro and tracing paper, Dad copied
the stands, the players, the goalposts,
and initialled each cross for us,
so that with Thursday's results
he could assess them
like air gun pellet holes on a paper target.
The editor always placed the ball
well away from our crosses,
and behind the gaze of the players.

Today it is the tracings that remain -
filling a drawer in the sideboard
where they grew year on year
as neatly stacked piles of outlines;
biroed football players with bewildered faces,
grey balloon-men charging across grey fields
towards wiry floodlights.

How odd they are
away from their time and purpose,
these records that were made
in the small hours of the morning,
each one showing our family
in translucent skies of inky birds
tagged for Mum, Dad, and Son.

'Spot the Ball' etching/carborundum print by Linda Nevill.

'Spot the Ball' is a collaboration with Linda Nevill; the poem explores my dad’s fascination with the competition. The visual aspect of this, in Linda’s piece and in my own DVD evolved from my dad’s tracings of his entry coupons.