0312 Even The Best May Stumble Poem by Michael Shepherd

Let’s suppose
you’ve bought or blagged
an invite to a buzzy West End party
after the football game, where
you’ll ‘mingle with the stars’

and when you get there, all glammed up
and wearing your Saturday best,
you glimpse, beyond a velvet, guarded rope,
the ‘stars’ you just won’t mingle with –

those ‘celebs’ with not too much to do
except to party and be photographed,
‘stars’ who’re hoping thus to burn the brighter
in the starry glitter of their combined glow…

while the hungry media, mingling in symbiosis,
poised to photograph,
smooze and click to elevate
these passing comets into myth

* * *

But every now and then
onto the stage of public wild acclaim
strolls the myth itself, the archetypal
Aristotelian hero –

not quite the Job or Oedipus whom
the gods single out for test, with all their force;
but the classic hero of the public stage
with that one fatal flaw, and
without the Stoic wisdom that
all life’s a lesson to be learned, who
finally puts a magic foot wrong; and then
fate gives the golden best the final boot…

Shakespeare missed out, so it seems, on sport,
apart from the Royal tennis court,
otherwise he might have seen
Othello, as a footballer,
Desdemona his other half, his god-given, wonder-working skill;
Iago the tempter whispering with sex and booze around
the light and lustre of our hero’s life he drove himself to kill
so killed his very self

‘To wilful men
the injuries that they themselves procure
must be their schoolmasters’…
Shakespeare would have recognised him
for what he was: earth-striding idol, feet of golden clay.

Yet those who knew him, as Cordelia did King Lear,
loved him
beyond all tragedy. Yes, he was more than that -
we have the footage of that golden foot.