TIPOFF

We lugged our dads’ old dented shovels 
and all our new Christmas basketballs,
moved with purpose through knee-high drifts,
knit hats over ears, wind reddened faces,
and stood at last below the sacred netless rim.
We buried our blades into the heart of the snow.
They rang against the outdoor court’s concrete.

Push, lift, pivot, fling the whiteness aside:
a mantra we fell into under winter sun
too weak to clear that holy place without our help.
But so much snow. Impatient, we could not make ourselves
clear more than half the court steaming inside winter clothes

and shook off coats and boots, our scarves and hats
and sweats, then even jeans, piled everything
atop abandoned shovels until we glowed,
as God intended, in Badger shorts and tees
and played before the cheering mounds of snow.

We dribbled and shot and ran on cherry red bare legs
in the feeble Wisconsin afternoon light until two sisters
arrived to tell us our families wanted us home. Cold,
we yanked on clothes and sorted shovels, headed homeward
trudging through snow as the moon appeared and new flakes fell.

Jerry Krajnak is a Vietnam veteran who later survived forty years in public school classrooms and collected degrees from UW Eau Claire, Wichita State, and the University of Kansas. He lives in a North Carolina mountain cabin that he shares with rescue animals and, when lucky, the occasional grandchild. Recent poems appear in Star 82 Review, I-70 Review, Plants and Poetry, New Verse News, Autumn Sky Poetry, and other journals. You can see more at jerrykrajnak.com.