Good night, Robert Burns, though we’ve not formally met.

I pass you all the time, aware of you, yet only on the occasional New Year’s eve do I give you true consideration. Until this evening…when I caught you looking out over our city…this evening when the sun was dialling down to a gentle horizon glow and spreading like honey to fill in the quiet.

It reached over to the Gardens and smoothed down the branches while whispering to the buds and the bulbs and all that lives secreted away within nature’s embrace, It will be okay, yes…shhh…It will be okay…do not be afraid of your fullness…they need it now more than ever.

This light encompassed All Saints as well, just past the parking lot for the hospital workers. One panel of stained glass caught fire with her touch and all distinction melted, leaving only a blaze of watchful grace.

Earlier on, it found its own reflection when my eyes met the eyes of a stranger standing at a distance, waiting to cross at the corner to your right. And I’m pretty sure a bit of it can balance on the tip of a dog’s tail and finds refuge tucked within the blue-black gleam of a crow’s wing.

The honeyed light seemed to follow me as I wandered the geography held in your gaze; a bit of its warmth was caught in the wood of the bench where I sat to watch night gently blow upon her embers and send up sentinel sparks to dance upon the heaven’s embroidered cloths while we sleep. (Forgive me the Yeats, please…)

I asked your forgiveness, but let me offer my thanks too…poets have long refracted life and shone upon what lies within their scope. They have tilted their hearts and listened for the tympanic stirrings of Spring, and the pooling of winter’s resonance. They have filled their ink bottles with the amber of sun, the turquoise flow of sky, of water, of time and knowing…they have filled their bottles, their words, with all the colours within the spectrum of what is real, what is true… and they have written at the convergence of the difficult and the glorious of now and the unknown perhaps of tomorrow.

They have written and left feathers of light bleeding into the spaces of our greatest need.

And they still do…Long may the radiance continue.

It is time for this poet to listen to the stories told within dreams…Thank you, again…and Good night, Robert Burns…though we’ve not yet formally met.