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You
You! Yes, you, small boy,
small for your age and made to look smaller by the tennis racket you’re brandishing.
Adult-size, stoutly-timbered,
with its gluey gut strings gone frayed and slack, it strains and pains your immature wrist.
Yet by degrees you are mastering the knack:
whacking that bald, almost unbouncing ball again and again against a gable-end wall.
One of the walls the war has left.
You’re back in the black-and-white nineteen-fifties. You represent survival, pluck, and making-do.
Returning a serve, you’re your own opponent,
deliciously lost in the first excitement of muddling personal pronouns.
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