Shagging Flies

Shagging flies at fifty was no big deal.

The field, illumined in the glow of three a.m.,

carried echoes to fly with the high-hit ball

bleak against the sun, and he took it loping

toward his comrades waiting. Breathing hard,

he saw the clock white against the dark,

waking from bedroom bench to meet the adult

hour, a game of faces turned expectant,

watching: paper-bound, desk-ridden, names

forgotten who ran armies and made laws

iron-veined as nature-loves too, stumbled on,

discarded, illnesses ignored, outgrown,

leaving the hided sphere for epitaph,

honor mettled in the dying air

of ancient afternoons to scroll how tall

and sure of foot he'd been, how strong and good.

Jack Walters is a retired journalist who began his career as a copyboy on The Philadelphia Inquirer in the 1930’s and subsequently became a reporter for Armed Forces Radio during WWII, a CBS correspondent during the Murrow years, bureau chief for Radio Free Europe and The Stars and Stripes, a stringer for AP and UPI, a reporter for NBC’s “Monitor,” a producer for ABC’s “Eyewitness News,” and a teacher of journalism for the University of Minnesota, Brooklyn College, and The New School University. He lives near Goshen, NJ.

Walters' new collection of poems, Saigon and Other Poems, is the culmination of ninety years of living, observing, and reporting. Jack Walters combines the great events of the American Century and the keenly-felt moments of a man's life into a body of poetry emotive, erudite and profound as anything written these past fifty years.

Saigon and Other Poems is the evocation of dreams, nightmares and realities: by turns more enthralling and terrible than mere states of mind. Walters takes the humdrum and the ostensibly inarticulable, and precisely communicates—makes new.

The collection is published by Spuyten Duyvil press.