I Am Third

Today’s poem is fresh off the November Poem a Day Challenge for 2024. The prompt was “third place,” and for the poem and its inspiration, I reached back into my childhood to the title of a book and a movie.

The book, I Am Third, was the basis for the 1971 made for TV Movie, Brian’s Song. I believe it was in 1974 that I got my copy of the book, and it was around that time that I saw the movie for the first time.

In 74, I was playing for the Bears just like Gayle Sayers and Brian Piccolo, except we called ourselves the bad news bears, and we weren’t in Chicago. I was playing for an NCAA football team. No, not that NCAA, it was the Northern Columbus Athletic Association.

Both the book and the movie shaped my imagination in significant ways. There was the reality of the impact of … and the need to address racial relations and the lingering segregation of the time. There were themes of deep, meaningful male relationships full of exhortation, challenge, and practical jokes, together with faithfulness. And of course there was the blessing of those abiding friendships which are forged together in adversity The book and movie both portray a kind of love that continues through illness, death, lingering grief, and as a desire to remember and honor those friends.

This poem takes it’s title from the book, which I thought wed well with the prompt. The poem is titled, “I Am Third.”

George Halas wanted his Bears to bloom
So, he put Gayle and Brian in the same room
Together — so simple, yet not done before
That a black man and white share the same door.

They walked through that door walked together in life
Late through the sixties where societal strife
Tried to tear their bonds of friendship apart,
But they walked as friends though things fell apart.

Their bond in suff’ring still makes men cry:
One blows his knee, then the other one dies.
The story found me in ’74,
And hearing the knock, I opened the door.

“Every true story,” they say, “ends in death,”
And in that true story, I now draw my breath—
Breathe in the love for friends who lay down
Their life for a friend, win Love’s other crown,
Love in deed like Brian, as Gayle in Word
Where God is first, others second, and I, third.

© Randall Edwards 2024

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