Postseason — Summary

Dave BontaContemplative

at home plate only a rabbit late in the fall

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Three short lines, and a whole scene opens up. The title, "Postseason," tells us the baseball year is over, and the poem shows what is left: an empty ballfield, and at home plate, where players once stood and crowds watched, only a rabbit.

The speaker doesn't say how they feel, but the feeling sits in the picture. There's a quiet sense of absence, the way a place seems bigger and stranger once the noise has gone. The words "late in the fall" add a note of ending, since the season is over and the year is closing too. Still, the mood isn't bleak. A rabbit sitting calmly on the most important spot on the field is a little funny and a little tender. Nature has simply moved back in.

The poem works by leaving things out. We're left to imagine the cheering that isn't there, and to notice how easily a place goes back to being wild and still.

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