My first game of football

By Dave Warner

My first game of football

I watched in the underbelly shadow of John Glenn’s orbiting capsule

and with no less wonder than him

slack-jawed at the spinning orb dangling just beyond gravity’s grasping fingers,

the memory still lingers

the rasp of the hot-dog boy, the rustle of Budgets,

the whistles of men in white echoing on a wisp of wind,

the sight of the stripes blue and white, Smith and Wesson

thud on boot ignites a yellow Chesson into parabolic splendour,

the smell of dry cooch,

shouts in unfamiliar vernacular, spectacular as any funicular,

vehicular collisions of bone and epidermis,

check rugs, thermos,

an explosion of sensation that Nagosakied the heart of this eight year old and demanded forever devotion,

a secular rosary of team placings back page Friday’s paper to re-reading hot off the press green smudgy pap on Saturday evening as South African fillet stewed on a gas-cooker,

a novena, every March to September, remembered

a genuflection to perfection begun my first game of football,

a torrent of unidentified passions, inspiring words that could not be formed let alone spoken

but undeniably living in gestation, a plasm in the blood, spontaneous,

contemporaneous to the astronaut spinning over seven oceans

through stars marvelled at by ancestor hunters wielding nothing but bone weapons and he in a fish bowl helmet
exalted, a privileged witness to this triumph of man

but no more so than I, an eight year old boy on the hill at East Fremantle Oval watching my first game of football.