David Beckham, Let Me Put My Poems In You.

I know when I’ve suffered some sort of horrific injury, having a poem penned on me is the only thing which will cure my ails.

Unfortunately, I am not David Beckham, so no one writes poems about me (at least not crudely scratched haiku in bathroom stalls). Luckily for David Beckham, he is David Beckham, so when he gets injured, the UK’s poet laureate drops whatever unimportant things such an important title requires of a person and writes clever little lines about his ails.

Carol Ann Duffy, who’s also made waves, though not quite Beckham-sized waves, by becoming the UK’s first gay/bisexual poet laureate, and whose Google Images is like a GlamourShots Hall of Fame, was so moved by his injury she spilled words onto her pages which told the combined story of Achilles, a man whose exploits were actually inspired by David Beckham (little known fact), and David Beckham.

“He (Beckham) is almost a mythical figure himself, in popular culture,” the poet told Radio 4’s The World At One. “People, like Beckham, in their public lives are stories the rest of us follow.

“It’s fascinating that the injury takes its name from Achilles… The whole point of Greek myths is the combination of triumph and tragedy that we follow in them,”

Her poem:

Achilles

Myth’s river – where his mother dipped him, fished him, a slippery golden boy flowed on, his name on its lips.

Without him, it was prophesied, they would not take Troy.

Women hid him, concealed him in girls’ sarongs; days of sweetmeats, spices, silver songs…

But when Odysseus came, with an athlete’s build, a sword and a shield, he followed him to the battlefield, the crowd’s roar,

And it was sport, not war, his charmed foot on the ball…

But then his heel, his heel, his heel…

In the sidebar of this wonderful little bit was a fantastic potpourri of links which pull similarities from the story, and the reading of which is bound to throw the calmest of men into hair-tearing fits:

The last one caught the eye, but honestly because I couldn’t wait to see a picture of David nodding off at a gallery opening his PR team had rushed him off to. This, however, was not the case. I wasn’t aware that someone filmed David Beckham sleeping for 67 minutes, put it on a television and then called it “art”.

You’d think if not for the internet and all this real time fact-archiving we’re going through, the myth of David Beckham might just trump Achilles in historic folklore, if ever such a thing were possible.

And if not for the internet, I’d be able to easily unlearn these things I so desperately want to.

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Category: English Premier League, World Football