Cricket Poetry Award 2009

Cricket season is almost upon us! It’s a sport I love and this season I will sorely miss seeing the boys play on our home paddock at Runnymede.

Thanks to the drought, a re-sown surface failed to emerge, so the boys with bat it out at Buckland this season instead of the pretty hawthorn-lined paddock at Runnymede — at least until we get some grass.

While I was on on book tour I found out my cricket poem (penned one night when John was at football training) had been selected and I was a finalist for the inaugural Cricket Poetry Award 2009.

My poem was performed at  a live reading in Sydney recently. 

The judges mentioned that they selected poems that “… spoke about how cricket was interwoven with life in an unforced and natural manner …”

I hope you enjoy my poem — sparked by my memories of my cricketing youth!

Fantasy for White
By Rachael Treasure

Zinc cream haze on freckles.
That’s me on The Hill. 
Terry-towelling hat.
Wheat-blonde hair. 
Breasts just buds. 
70’s summer of love-awakened with spilled-beer perfume.
Wobbly-booted yobbos, fizzing ring-pull cans. 
The crisp ‘tock’ of ball on bat in the chasm of my chest. 
Solar Plexus bliss.

Us kids entertain the boozers, stacking tinnies pyramid-high. 
Blokes clatter our Cascade kingdom.
Hoo-haaing in their Alvin Purple world. 
Dad draped over his esky as if it were mum. Tranny to his ear.

My life grew green and white with blu-tacked men on bedroom walls. 
Knights wield willow swords. 
Sports-Gods, sunscreen-smeared.
Homework forgotten.

Now, The Hill is my heat-mirage of summer-youth. 
Those Ashes men could be my son. 
But can I soak your whites? 
Just to breathe the musk of liniment and mown grass. 
Forever a girl, and fantasy for white.