I was a cricketer

I was a cricketer back when
my anterior talofibular ligament was intact
and properly connected to the surrounding tissue.
An all-rounder to be exact, in the lowest-ranked team of my local club.
Identities are not always built on prowess,

but bats knocked in on Christmas mornings,
poker games during rain delays,
pizzas on the fields outside our clubrooms
the night before I left my hometown for the first time.

So what do we do when we have little left
in common with the self we’ve built?
Well, I got into Proust for one thing, fell in love and out again,
keep the flowers that remain
pressed between the pages of Swann’s Way.

But this is a poem about cricket, the sport,
the concept, the arbitrary set of rules we agree to,
the way we passed thirty years’
worth of Saturday afternoons.
Now I’m allowed to run for exactly one minute
every second day. The idea is to teach
the surrounding muscles to compensate for the injury.
Please don’t mistake this for a poem about
overcoming. This is a poem about cricket,
a sore ankle, at the most, grace,
and the way we fail to heal.

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Kim Fulton has a master’s degree in creative writing. Her thesis explored how poets use humour and irony to approach loss without sentimentality. Her writing has appeared in journals including takahē, Landfall, and Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook. She is the author of the poetry collection I kind of thought the alpacas were a metaphor until we got there.