Poet’s Corner: Dispatches from the Winter Games

description

Priscila Uppal is poet-in-residence for the Canadian Athletes Now Fund during the Olympics and Paralympics. Through dispatches and poetry for the LRC, Priscila will blog about her experiences there and at the Arctic Games in Grande Prairie, Alberta. She is the editor of The Exile Book of Canadian Sports Stories and author of the Griffin Poetry Prize-nominated Ontological Necessities.

Mar 18

Sledhead—The Poem

for Billy Bridges

This isn’t standup hockey.
Our team is colder, bolder,
more bruised under the maple leaf
than you can imagine.

This is the definition of physical.
Full-body contact into unforgiving boards,
pucks to the face, torsos to ice, spiked
sticks stabbing into sides.

Every man on the ice has a story
whose moral is victory, if only he doesn’t run out
of time.

This is ice-calligraphy.
Sleds carve their names as they race from goal
to goal, bench to bench, penalty box
to locker room.

This isn’t standup hockey.
Our team tests its strength against 
the rinks and scoreboards themselves.

No prediction remains unsmashed.
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