Lines for Buck and Angus

Hut-Hut! Hike! (lines for Buck and Angus)

When the local squad has lost

its last couple stoutest gentlemen

all-time, the fans and franchise

will surely feel that stunning wallop

as I in my bruised burnt-orange colours

feel it now, hearing the day’s sporting news,

kneeling in my low wind-whipped huddle

of thoughts and feelings.

These fellows, out on time’s chewed-up gridiron

with the old brown laced pointy-nosed pigskin,

in cleats and pads and helmet, were old school.

They were tough, and they were tender-sweet.

We heard them grunt and toss their thick heads,

this bullish tandem, saw the centre’s quick flip,

then watched the pretty finessed spiral,

even as you watched their big-boned bodies

rise and fall and fall and rise. Rise slow-mo

against the heavy pull of gravity. In vertical tug,

but with a vision for the long-view—‘going long’

going deep. For ten and thirteen seasons,

a decade of campaigns and more,

the dust never settled round them.

Quick brains at times slowed and concussed,

their limbs wrapped and bandaged,

but the strategic agile will and desire

ever creative and alive, those tails still twitching.

In that history of shared cadences between them,

centre-man and pivot, between old mighty Buck

and Angus, one last sharp rhythmic ‘hut-hut, hike’

will always echo on, though buried under

a great brute vocabulary’s pile and tangle,

articulate, reverberating round the roofless stadium

and out, whether grandstands be rowdy filled

or left empty and forlorn, with one thoughtful man 

remembering whatever last gasp effort. 

Their numbers hung in the halls

of local memory. The memories, the fame of them,

our bruised and bloodied best, our stoutest gentlemen,

chin-straps undone, sweat-soaked, still

may they ever play—the good game.     

March 2014   

Larry Nightingale (life-long Lions fan)