The rugby player

 When I was a young rugby player

I would run from post to post

Filled with the Holy Ghost

Like Saint George I was a dragon slayer

I would hew down my enemy 

In the most collosal tackles

And hold them by the knee

Lock their ankles in shackles

And fell them like the trees

While the pitch was my garden

Come winter time or Spring

When the frost would harden

When I was a young rugby player

When I was a young rugby player

My poetry was like Keats so Romantic and daring

Like Tennyson in its grandeur

Like Walt Whitman in Scope

I would look to the further field

And see in there only hope

When I was a young rugby player

Now I'm an old rugby player

My knees are more like rickety staircases

Creaking like a galleon upon a rocky ocean

My back is like a drawbridge rigid when bending

My arms like helicopter blades

Not so flexible for defending

Yet I still rise in the morning with the cockerel

Come home in evening with the cows

Raise my crops on the Rugby pitch

When the storms come I plough my furrowed brows

Now I'm an old Rugby player 

My poetry comes out much more like ee cummings

So modern and irreverent to formal rules some how

I no longer follow that old referee's whistle

When he blows it at grammatical fouls

Ignore Homer and Shakespeare and Wordsworth's Epistles

I prefer all the new poets now

For I'm in the avant-garde vanguard bringing up the rear

In my attack, from the back I haven't any fear

Now I'm an old Rugby player