2004 Red Sox World Series: Play Poems!

Despite the wonder of it all, I can’t help but be nostalgic during this 2004 World Series for 1967 and the year of the Impossible Dream. Until that year, at least in my baseball memory that reached as far back as the late fifties, the Red Sox had been perennial cellar dwellers. But that year turned things around.

It was the revolution that created Red Sox Nation, and it culminated in a season-ending Yaz-driven victory on the last day of the regular season to clinch the American League pennant. The 67 Series went seven, with Bob Gibson almost single-handedly winning it for the Cardinals.

Coincidentally, the last time the Sox had been in the World Series, 1946, the Cardinals had beat them in seven also. But as I said earlier, the third time’s the charm that will break the curse of an 86 year old drought—I hope.

Looking Back and Forward to
Red Sox–Cardinals World Series

The ghosts are streaming through the turnstiles,
purchasing a program book,
looking for their seats within
my cerebellum. I mistook
Jim Lonborg for some toothache pain
and Rico for the windowpane
I tripped out on in sixty-nine.
(Tony C of course stayed home,
his swollen eye a sign of things
to come within that hippodrome
of sixty-eight’s political
election race.) It’s critical
to let these specters take their seats
and hear them whimper, hush, or cheer.
If not, our history repeats,
and it will never be our year—
for ghosts tell Pesky fairytales
but truth and Varitek prevails.

The new Mantra the same as the old Mantra: one game at a time, one game at a time, one game at a time, one game at a time. Go Wake!


Update: see my complete Red Sox ALCS/World Series chapblog here.