The muse has stirred Gwyneth Lewis to touch on rugby again, though this time in a minor key. Wales's national poet greeted last year's grand slam triumph with "The Ball Between Us", but last week's humiliating draw with Italy in the Millennium Stadium has provoked "A Wooden Spoon for the WRU".
The poem is part of her role as national poet to mark national occasions and reflect "what people are thinking". "It came on me quickly," she says. "A lot of people in Wales have been mystified and frustrated by recent events."
Her anger is directed firmly at the suits who sacked Mike Ruddock last month, "shadowy men with hands like sieves" and their "backroom moves of dodge and scheme" who she says have "made our last grand slam a joke".
She is at pains to stress that she hasn't given up on the players ahead of this weekend's encounter with France, sending the team her "good wishes", but points instead to "some curious decisions" from the WRU over the last few years. It is the waste of talent that annoys her, "the sense of the right people not being looked after".
Lewis's plain speaking hasn't gone down too well with the Welsh Rugby Union, who said in a statement to the BBC they were "disappointed that she's chosen to write this new poem, particularly without contacting us for any information on the matter".
Lewis confesses that she's a little mystified herself by the attention her poem has received. "It's very curious," she says, explaining that there is little difference between her public poems and the poetry she might have written anyway. "The thing that is different is the platform. It shows that poetry can do something that no other kind of public speech can."
But what next? Has Andrew Motion got the Mohali blues? Will Ted Kooser turn on baseball's backroom boys? Or are there unofficial laureates out there burning to dish the dirt on the Lawn Tennis Association, or praise our swimming heroes to the skies?
