January 2016
I am a retired business-to-business PR and publishing professional residing in northern New Jersey with my wife and son and a shrinking menagerie of merry pets. I began writing poetry (not very well) 100 years ago as an undergraduate at Georgetown University, where I earned bachelor's and master's degrees in English Literature. My poems have appeared recently in Contemporary American Voices (I was the Featured Poet in the January 2015 issue), the Wilderness House Literary Review, Blue Monday Review, and Atavic Poetry. In 2013, I celebrated (mostly by smiling a lot) the publication of my first poetry chapbook, What Comes Next, by Finishing Line Press. A lifelong Giants fan (New York and San Francisco), I still can't believe I lived long enough to see them win three World Series in five years. If you'd like to see more of my work, please click on http://www.whlreview.com/no-9.4/poetry/JamesKeane.pdf.
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Editor's Note: In his submission letter to me, Jim wrote about this poem: "[Here] is a poem titled "A New Picture." Also attached is the photo of my father as a high school baseball player that inspired the poem. The original version, which I wrote in the third person and gave to my father on a long-ago Father's Day, ended on an optimistic note. After his death, I took a new look at the photo, and at the poem, which I revised, re-cast in the second person, and concluded on a note of regret for what might have been for the boy whose adult life was ahead of him."
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A New Picture
I had to look at it twice before
I knew the shadow radiant and
fleeting was the boy
who never grew to be
you. Lean forever,
a flannelled figure looms
in the gloomy majesty cloaking
the offended dignity, perhaps,
of a Dead Ball Era exile, frozen
for all time in the Roaring
Ruthian Twenties. But
suddenly the simple radiance of a boy
overshadows all gathering
gray — a lithe form tapers
a drab uniform when simply
no one needs a custom fit
to play. In his own beaming way,
he has stung the ball to screaming
away any sullen rage the silent men
behind him, appraising him might
nurture to threaten the radiance joyfully
at play, on this one day. Dad,
your brooding anger
grown mad (older, yet sad
I never grew to know), came finally
undone a lifetime to the day radiance
embraced your shadow
like a son, till they beamed as
one with the gathered
gray on the lone
joy eagerly your smile, dying
in delight, will always know: a baseball
is in flight, and you lean forever
to grow.
Previously published with a different title in my poetry chapbook, What Comes Next (Finishing Line Press).
©2016 James Keane