Slam, Dunk, & Hook

The poem opens with the rapid, start-stop-start of two basketball terms: “Fast break. Lay ups.” (Line 1). In this, Komunyakaa generates a sports-commentary style excitement and announces his speaker as someone immersed in basketball rather than a casual observer. This is continued in the reference to “Mercury’s Insignia on our sneakers” (Line 2), suggesting the importance that young players sensitive to fashion iconography might attach to their footwear. Mercury is the winged messenger god of classical Roman mythology, and like the more famous shoe brand Nike (also named after a Roman god) it evokes the players’ naive belief that style and branding may help them reach a god-like level of sporting prowess. This grandiose idea of basketball as a contest in the realm of immortal heroes continues in Lines 3-4, with the speaker emerging victorious against “bad angels” (Line 4).

Lines 4-6 offer a comparison between music, eroticism, and sporting prowess: “Nothing but a hot / Swish of strings like silk / Ten feet out.” Komunyakaa uses the line break after the erotically charged “hot” to mimic the pause as players watch to see if the ball will find its target, then combines the onomatopoeic “swish” with alliteration on “s” to create an audio of the basket being scored, punctuated by the percussive sounding: “Ten feet out.” The image of the ball hanging in the air before it drops is then echoed in the description of the players in Lines 6-10, but for the first time uncertainty enters the poem: “In the roundhouse / Labyrinth our bodies / Created, we could almost / Last forever, poised in midair / Like storybook sea monsters.” A labyrinth is a place designed to confuse and trap the unwary, while “almost / Last forever” is the speaker’s realization that the immortality of sporting prowess is an illusion. “Storybook sea monsters,” besides conjuring the image of a seething mass of limbs, suggests a certain doomed element to the players: In someone else’s version of the narrative, they may not be heroes, but antagonists.

By this point in the poem, three key elements—basketball, music, and mythology—are firmly intertwined and when Komunyakaa writes in Line 11, “A high note hung there,” the reader senses another shot has been attempted. Only this time the result is failure: The ball rebounds “Off / The rim” (Lines 12-13). The reaction violent as the players “exploded / The skullcap of hope & good / Intention” (Lines 14-16). A skullcap is a protective device for the head originally designed for battle in medieval times, and its destruction suggests the players could be much more vulnerable than they thought.

The bubble of their god-like delusion is further burst as the speaker describes himself and the others as: “Lanky, all hands / & feet…sprung rhythm” (Lines 16-17). These players now seem more like typical adolescents, not quite in control of their own bodies—an impression confirmed by the admission that they “were metaphysical when girls / Cheered on the sidelines” (Lines 18-19). In other words, these boys’ sense of themselves as metaphysical—as cognizant beings able to question the nature of existence—is linked to something as fragile as the extent to which they can impress girls. Their confusion, reinforced in Line 20: “Tangled up in a falling,” can only be assuaged by relentlessly playing the game they know as the speaker reminds the reader with another technical basketball term: “Double-flashing to the metal hoop / Nailed to our oak” (Lines 22-23).

The boys’ endless repetition of the fall down/get-up/keep-playing cycle reaches its ultimate, tragic pitch in Lines 24-26: “When Sonny Boy’s Mama died / He played nonstop all day, so hard / Our backboard splintered” (Lines 25-26). Suddenly, in plain language, the speaker describes how a boy’s reaction to losing his mother is to play basketball. It is a poignant moment in the poem, in which the reader can picture Sonny Boy losing himself in the game to avoid dealing with the loss of his mother. The other boys play along: “We rolled the ball off / Our fingertips” (Line 28-29).

Yet the poem suggests there are menacing forces waiting for all of them: “Trouble / Was there slapping a blackjack / Against an open palm” (Lines 30-32). A blackjack was a type of baton used by law enforcement in the 1950s and 60s, suggesting that “trouble” is a police officer keen to inflict violence. This is an ironic diction choice, as it’s likely that the police viewed the boys as troublesome, not the other way around. Turning this idea around was intentional and contributes to the deeper layers of meaning in this poem.

Blackjack can also refer to a perfect winning hand from the deal in the casino game of the same name, hinting at an invincible opponent to whom the boys have already lost before they start. These lines strongly hint at racist attacks on Black people by the forces of power, adding an additional layer of threat from society to the seemingly random tragedy of Sonny’s mother dying and the boys’ innocuous basketball games.

With the vulnerability of the players now firmly established, the response of the boys—to keep playing (“Dribble, drive to the inside” (Line 32)), glorying in their image of themselves (“& glide, like a sparrow hawk” (Line 33))—takes on a new force. The repetition of the poem’s opening lines reinforces the cyclical pattern of classical tragedy, where the death of the hero results in cathartic rebirth. It signals an ending to the poem as the speaker reflects on the players’ moves with an awareness of their significance beyond the sporting level: “Our bodies spun / On swivels of bone & faith / Through a lyric slipknot of joy” (Lines 38-40). In its final lines, the poem has moved beyond basketball to an awareness of the boys’ precarious condition as young Black men in a society which has seen, and perhaps still sees them, as a threat: “We knew we were / Beautiful & dangerous” (Line 41-42).