Bugle call rag ...

Now that Title IX has brought beauty and parity to sport, it is only fitting that our newspapers are beginning to recruit more female poets for their sports pages.

We love the revolution. Sure, the girls stumble a bit over the X's and O's, but they can also dazzle us with their eloquence. It's nice to find a little more Emily Dickinson and a little less Jimmy Cannon in our sports columns.

Our favorite sports poet does her thing for the New York Times. She exudes pretty metaphors, sometimes a bit aimlessly but, who knows, maybe it's art. How can you resist a passage like this:

"Striding bravely side by side, the parents of the deceased had led the mourners on a three-block walk ... to the church when a sound began emanating from the streets of Elmira, Ontario, a sound every ounce as reverential as the lonely howl of a bugle."

And what kind of sound could possibly be as reverential as the howl of a bugle? She calls it the "sound of hundreds of solemn young athletes tapping the pavement with their hockey sticks."

This had to be the first time in the history of mankind, Bach, and Louis Armstrong that anyone connected the tapping of a hockey stick with the lonely howl of a bugle. (Cats, wolves, and winds make lonely howls, bugles blast.)