Maybe It Would Have Been A Homer

by g emil reutter

The continuous spasms run the circuit board of my
nervous system, and I have no one to
blame but myself. Yet in this room, a prison for three
days I hear life all around me. The horns of the commuter
trains on the hour and the mighty blasts from the freight
diesels switching racks at Newtown Junction pulling
hundreds of cars three time a day.

And there is young mother yelling on the sidewalk under
my window, I wish she would lose her voice. The old ladies
talk on the stoop, their murmuring puts me to sleep as the
sounds of passerby’s and cars fill the air.

As dusk falls, just a few days past solstice, I think of all those
summers past and baseball. Now in my 56th year I know I can
never go back and never again feel that great joy of when a
ball pops off a bat, lands where you wanted it to. Maybe it
would have been a homer.