Carol Ann Duffy's Olympic poem: oh do shut up, you silly, talentless cow!

This is what our poet laureate came up with to celebrate the past fortnight. I was going to go off on one, but Peter Mullen has done done such a great hatchet-job for the Telegraph there's no point. As the splendidly splenetic ex-vicar puts it: "This rubbish is only possible in an age which doesn’t know what a poem is but imagines that it can be any lines in which the words don’t quite extend to the margins of the page." You can read the rest of his taekwondo-style assault here. Gird your loins and read on...

A summer of rain, then a gap in the clouds
and The Queen jumped from the sky
to the cheering crowds.
We speak Shakespeare here,
a hundred tongues, one-voiced; the moon bronze or silver,
sun gold, from Cardiff to Edinburgh
by way of London Town,
on the Giant's Causeway;
we say we want to be who we truly are,
now, we roar it. Welcome to us.
We've had our pockets picked,
the soft, white hands of bankers,
bold as brass, filching our gold, our silver;
we want it back.
We are Mo Farah lifting the 10,000 metres gold.
We want new running-tracks in his name.
For Jessica Ennis, the same; for the Brownlee brothers,
Rutherford, Ohuruogu, Whitlock, Tweddle,
for every medal earned,
we want school playing fields returned.
Enough of the soundbite abstract nouns,
austerity, policy, legacy, of tightening metaphorical belts;
we got on our real bikes,
for we are Bradley Wiggins,
side-burned, Mod, god;
we are Sir Chris Hoy,
Laura Trott, Victoria Pendleton, Kenny, Hindes,
Clancy, Burke, Kennaugh and Geraint Thomas,
Olympian names.
We want more cycle lanes.
Or we saddled our steed,
or we paddled our own canoe,
or we rowed in an eight or a four or a two;
our names, Glover and Stanning; Baillie and Stott;
Adlington, Ainslie, Wilson, Murray,
Valegro (Dujardin's horse).
We saw what we did. We are Nicola Adams and Jade Jones,
bring on the fighting kids.
We sense new weather.

We really do appear to be living in an era of British sporting giants and artistic pygmies. If only the Daily Mirror (apparently it's all their fault) had asked Shakespeare's true successor, the great Benjamin Zephyr Zodiac, to pen an ode on the same subject.