To send National Poetry Month on its way after its annual visit, let us consider a couple of apparently strange bedfellows: sports and verses. Because these visibly divergent, adversarial activities—physical exertion in contrast to imagery and emotion (sports versus verses)—in fact have real and metaphysical links.

How do I demonstrate? Let me count the ways.

Onomatopoeia can tackle jocks, can swish a basketball. Athletes do perform rhythmically, lyrically at times. Not only is there a substantial body of poetry about sports—and several cases of athletes turned poets—there also is this uncanny connection:

Five years ago, Wimbledon tennis officials designated, as their tournament’s first poet laureate, one Matt Harvey. Baseball fans certainly know the name, if not that Matt Harvey’s work, which includes a concise piece about Andy Murray, the Scotland-born United Kingdom favorite who often disappointed his national following before finally winning Wimbledon in 2013:

If ever he’s brattish/or brutish or skittish

He’s Scottish.

But when he looks fittish/and his form is hottish

He’s British.

One of the best known poems in American literature is a baseball piece, Ernest Thayer’s 1888 “Casey at the Bat,” such a standard that it has spawned countless takeoffs, including then-New York City major John Lindsay’s “Ode to the New York Mets” on the occasion of the 1969 World Series:

Oh, the outlook isn’t pretty for the Orioles today/They may have won the pennant, but the Mets are on the way…..

A member of that championship Mets team, third baseman Ed Charles, has written numerous poems, including “Jackie Robinson, Superstar,” penned on Oct. 24, 1972, the day Robinson died:

He accepted the challenge and played the game/with a passion that few men possessed.

He stood tall in the face of society’s shame/with a talent that God had blessed….

At the 2012 London Olympics, the poet laureate of South Dakota, David Allan Evans—a former pole vaulter—presented his verse, “Pole Vaulter:”

Unless I have counted my steps/hit my markers/feel up to it

I refuse to follow through/I am committed to beginnings/or to nothing….

Plus, of course, there were Mohammad Ali’s little rhymes, often crafted to predict when and how he would win specific bouts, and sometimes merely to broadcast his own greatness:

I dance and I have a fast hook/I take the people’s money like I’m a crook.

In a recent airing of NPR’s “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me,” Boston Red Sox public address announcer and team poet laureate Dick Flavin recited his rhyming tribute to Hall of Famer Carl Yastrzemski, which concludes:

There just is no rhyme to go with Yastrzemski/And take that from one who had made the attemptski.  

Which is reminiscent of a 1968 ditty about Baltimore Colts lineman Dick Szymanski by the wonderfully sly Ogden Nash:

The life of an offensive center/is one that few could wish to enter.

You’ll note that that of Dick Szymanski/Is not all roses and romanski….

I have an old book of sports poems, edited by R.R. Knudson and P.K. Ebert, with compositions covering all the major athletic endeavors, and even some of the lesser ones, such as parachuting and polo.  It concludes with a list of the sports about which the editors “were unable to locate poems.” And an invitation for the reader to “try writing your own.”

Uh, oh…

Limerick, quatrain, doggerel, sonnet/How to describe a sport? Dog-gone it…

Maybe something like this for the Winter Olympic sport of biathlon?

Guns and violence/Snot dripping from my nose.

Sweating’ in wintertime/Can’t feel my toes.

As much as I try, can’t deny/I’m a bi

Athlete.

To make Charlton happy/I’m totin’ a rifle.

Wax you with my skis/With me, don’t trifle.

White beard, white hair/Struggle with blank stare.

Rickety stride, pain in my side/I’m a bi

Athlete.

OK, then. Perhaps figure skating?

I can’t figure skating/And I can’t figure her

Slipping around with guys in sequins

Falling on their wallets with a certain frequen

Cy.

That one goes on a couple more stanzas. And I have others. But the good news is that National Poetry Month is over.