Riell Books

Old Whitman Loved Baseball and Other Baseball Poems

"Ed Rielly's passion for poetry and baseball is contagious. A master of both haiku and longer verse, Rielly connects past and present as well as the diamond and life outside the lines. In these poems, mature reflection imbues the baseball summers of our youth with a lingering resonance. Rielly's baseball poetry renders the heroic, mythic, commonplace, and ironic as vivid as the "unnaturally fat" but potent bat barrel of the gritty second baseman Nellie Fox."

--William Simons, Professor and former Chair of History, SUNY Oneonta; Editor and Director, The Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture.

The Babe Hits His Final Homer

(May 25, 1935)

The quiet rain is filtering
down the sky. Neither you nor I
will see a player like him again --

the power swing, the robust king
of the world of baseball. We tend
our days, plan future ways

to find a hero larger than life,
but mundane joys and rooms of toys
cannot eclipse that summer strife

when mighty Ruth, his bat his truth,
crashed one more massive home run --
and then, finally, all was done.

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