Miki de Goodaboom, “Alfred Dunhill Links Championship 02”
I miss the Olympics, which were so enthralling that I didn’t even notice that the final major golf tournament was going on during the final four days. I only learned later that Tiger was in contention in the PGA Championship until the final day and that Rory McIlroy—possibly the only player that can fill the hole that Tiger has left with his decline (or so I posted at one point)—won it.
I can’t comment on the tournament, but here’s a poem about golf, another instance of my father’s light verse. It takes as its starting point a Sarah Cleghorn poem that I invoked during the Republican primaries when Newt Gingrich was urging the return of child labor (or at least of poor kids working as janitors in the public schools). The poem begins with the Cleghorn poem and culminates in a William Blake or Pied Piper vision of liberated child workers. Imagine them as the children working in sweatshops around the world.
L Is a Broken Golf Club or The Mystery of the Missing Links
By Scott Bates
The golf links lay so near the mill
That almost every day
The laboring children could look out
And see the men at play.
–Sarah Cleghorn
…Until the L’s went out on strike
They’d seen those children there
and broke the clubs. They stopped the game
and stripped the GOF INKS bare
of all the L’s With nothing left
but CUBS and HOES and BAS
they rose like Lifts of Boomerangs
like Lyrics of Jckdaws
Looping the Loop and Lazily Loafing
floating over the plain
till they came to the MILL
where they Linked together
and formed into a chain
and joined with the L’s in the WALLS of the MILL
and suddenly pulled out
leaving the WAS like JERICHO
a pile of sauerkraut
and sailed on into the dusty HAS
where the children worked all day
and stopped the OOMS and broke the OCKS
and led them all away
over the hills and pastures where
swallows fly above
in Liberated Lands of Light
where Labor’s Linked to Love . . .
………………………………..
The restaurant stood so near the slum
that down in the dirty street
the starving children could look in
and see the rich men eat
until the P’s pulled out on strike . . .
(to be continued)
A note on the artist: Golf enthusiast Miki de Goodaboom has a whole series of golf paintings at mikiaboom.wordpress.com/tag/golf-painting.
