Another cricket poem, written in 2002, that rather angrily narrates a game played in Buckinghamshire under leaden skies that summer. There's lots of style-thieving going on here, from the Betjemanesque "MetroLand" setting and langour to the perhaps more obvious Springsteen "Darkness On The Edge Of Town" homage! But i like the narrator's down-trodden voice and the way it captures a place where the suburbs meet the country.
Beneath the Chiltern Hills
There’s a darkness on the edge of the square
No
ploughman’s in the bar, just a publican’s glare
No
thatched pavilion or patchwork quilt green
In
the Buckinghamshire badlands it’s always number thirteen
In
the darkness on the edge of the square
Dave
surveys the averages, rifles his hair
We’re
beyond the Hoover Factory, where the Downs begin,
Where
the highway ends, Don unloads the coffin…
Here’s
a pink plastic abdominal protector
Worn
by ringers carrying sexual infection,
Well-thumbed
scorecards tell a tale
Of
serial failure and the menopausal male,
Of
splintered willow and left hand gloves,
A
hundred hangovers and a million lost loves
There’s
a darkness on the edge of the square
No
ploughman’s in the bar, just a publican’s glare
No
thatched pavilion or patchwork quilt green
In
the Buckinghamshire badlands it’s always number thirteen
The
opposition arrive in their sensible cars,
With
their sensible wives, their miniature cigars
The
butchers, the bakers, the forex market makers
Encircle
me now; they’re all wicket takers
On
the scorebox sits a solitary magpie,
One
for all my sorrows, (let sleeping dogs lie),
In
comes the paceman, he’s nineteen years
old,
Around
his bull neck hangs a chain of gold,
And
I can’t even remember my last cover driven four,
My
last sober laughter, my last decent
score.
And
the pavilion behind like a dark satanic mill,
In
brooding April darkness beneath the