Thoughts on Robert Burns

Now Burns night has been and gone I thought I'd share with you a poem I wrote in December in honour of the Scottish bard who spokeand wrote and sang for all the world...

So simply precious, that Kilmarnock treasury OF POEMS Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect

 

 

Thoughts of Robert Burns

January seventeen fifty nine,

cold winter’s day, old Alloway:

to Scottish farming stock

was born a boy, and what a boy

was this, this Robert, Rabbie

Burns or Burnes (with or without the ‘e’)

who grew into a shining star

ascending to arc the firmament,

changed words to arrows, plain,

or in the Scotsman’s dialect

that, flashing out to everyone,

pierced, lifting up their hearts

with things as small as harvest mice

or wise and wonderful, the parts

beyond imagining or any price.

To him a man was just a man

for all that and for all that

from wheresoe’re on earth he springs

so long as straight, within his time

he honesty and humour brings.

If music be the food of poets’ love

from deep inside his ancient

Scottish roots Rab culled the songs

that have become immortal, and,

when any exile for his homeland longs

foursquare with that man Rabbie stands.

 

Like every caring working man  

Burns strove to feed his family

by dint and stint of plough and pen,

and later roved the lowland roads

on business for His Majesty.

Yet all his life the songsmith poet

also knew the need to feed

his views egalitarian and his muse

and found his provender for this

in places often frowned on by

his peers and his superiors,

like rough and bawdy fairs, alehouses

and in the arms, the eyes, the lips

of bonnie Scotland’s womankind:

but look, he only reached out there

believing true he was in love,

(as well as by her truly loved),

and with her all the pleasures proved, compared his heart with that

undying rose; that red, red rose

that’s newly sprung in June, that

melody that’s never out of tune

Ploughman poet Robert Burns,

like some volcanic rock afire,

that’s hurled up high, so high above

mere commonplace mundanity

of heat suffice to set alight

the sullen earth, the endless sky,

oh yes, too bright for many folk

of its own time to look at, see,

shedding as it goes in some great

wild parabola, poetic sparks

and soon this melting rock

slowed, fell away and cooled, and,

sighing, met with careless death

as all things must,

so Rabbie all too soon

expelled his final breath.

Burns is never lost to memory:

this man of rock, this poet shall

within my time abide with me;

tell in ways and words ethereal that 

to live is more than just to be.

Bryan Islip

for the Wester-Ross Burns Club meeting

20 December 2011