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
