St. Paul Saints Poetry

Thank you to the St. Paul Saints baseball organization for promoting and supporting local poets. Before the first game of the season, the club put out a call for poems. Selected poems were displayed in the springtime poetry garden that popped up in the plaza in front of the ballpark!

Suzanne Hequet and Judy Daniel submitted poems to the contest, and they were accepted for display at the poetry garden. Their poems are included below.

The First Game

The town is ready for a game tonight.
The teams are warming up in the pale moonlight.
We take our seats to watch the show
As the pig warms up in the dugout below.

The home team runs out to the field just then,
As the umpire sweeps the plate while doing knee bends.
The pig is in uniform, looking real sharp!
He’s loaded with tonight’s balls
Looking like he’s out on a lark.

I love this town and this park
With the river close by shimmering in the dark.
It’s home and yet away.
My cares are blown astray
As I watch the first pitch–
It’s a strike. Hooray!

By Suzanne Hequet

Spring Again

White plum blossoms cut
through the bare
angry arms of oaks.
Beyond them
yellow tulips scatter light
across the hillside.

Seymour walks to work, eyes blurry with
the night’s images, pollen burning
like white phosphorus into this brain,
“Stop,” he speaks out loud
without meaning to. “Look at
the beauty of what lies before you.”

He squints into the sun, lets
its warmth fall over him, feels the
moist fingers of grass rise
toward him, around him. “Rejoice
Seymour,” he counsels
himself. “You are still here. You

may be sleep walking, but
the earth is alive!” He
wants to tell himself that nature
will always renew itself
but the words stick in his throat.
Instead he repeats,

“Rejoice Seymour!
It is morning.
You have survived another night.”

By Judy Daniel

About the authors

name: Suzanne Hequet

Suzanne Hequet is a church historian and Reformation scholar, faculty emerita as of 2020 at Concordia University Saint Paul, Minnesota. She earned her PhD from Luther Seminary, Saint Paul, Minnesota, in 2005. She is the author of The 1541 Colloquy at Regensburg: In Pursuit of Church Unity, 2009.

name: Judy Daniel

Judy Daniel is a poet and fiction writer who, at age six, was delighted by stories at the Riverview Library’s Saturday morning Children Hour. After teaching and writing in England and Spain, she returned to Minnesota to become a founding member of  Poets-in-the School (now The Loft).