Starlight is fading, clouds cover the  moon,
the wind gently stirs the leaves of the stiff holly bush.
All else is silence, a woman whispers a rosary and I sigh,
in contemplation of the ineffable that I haven't the words to portray.
There is laughter in that silence, barely heard below the whisper,
laughter, and a gentle sob.
This is the first night in a long time that I have stepped outside for a smoke,
five years my meerscham sat dormant collecting dust.
It is an awful lot, the life of an artist,
always trying to make things better...
or worse.
For what it is worth I would not choose to be anything more
than a simple poet, who smokes a pipe at night (only)
and has nothing but time to examine the dimming,
the lowering of the shimmering
the fading of the stars that I once new all the names of.
Heartless men manouver, and orchestrate machinations,
not me.
I am a poet, and a poet sips the last drop of the fading starlight
from a tiny thimble, because a poet is entitled to such things,
it is his salary for doing the things that no one else can.
For seeing the truth beyond the ineffable.
Not only seeing, but recording.
Only poets do these things right.
Everything else that might be done, is better off left to someone
other than a poet.
Someone, who simply is more focused on moving forward.
We poets linger, like an odor...
not foul, at least not always.
But none the less, it does us no good.
I am no longer a poet, I cant pierce the veil, and see the wisdom
in a beam of moonlight.
I can only sit here.
Smoke my pipe,
and wait.
The fading starlight tells me that I can't wait long.
The song of my soul, will sing, it must sing, or else
it is better that we cease to be...
Perhaps I am through. Either way I will smoke this pipe for all its worth,
and when the last tendril of smoke drifts away, I will head to my bed
where I will sleep soundly for the first time in over a month.

A Burns 2012