To a Poet

To a Poet -  To you who scribe the precious lines preserving time and memory

As ages pass it can be seen
That deeds and glories fade,
As mortal memory slips away
The price for lessons paid
In the days our fathers knew,
That shaped our lives,
Are here to view.
So long as memory thrives.

Yet memory's whimsy tells a tale
The woven fabric teller-twisted
Is altered in the act saying,
When change is un-resisted.
Yet in  rhyme a magic charm
Thrills on from age to age,
A richer purer memory
Than that of History's page.

For in a poem or a song
The lyric is confined
Living on precisely
In words as they are rhymed.
The secret truth suspended there
In honest poet's meter,
Preserves the thought, the pith of truth
And makes the telling sweeter.

The lovers' aches, their throbs and woes,
The humble soldier's rudeness.
The frailties in every man,
The drunken pedant's crudeness.
The power of Bruce for freedom's cause,
The fall of Charlie's standard,
The disappointed mother's grief
When faith in child's abandoned.

So poet, to you charge is given
To set their record straight,
And through the spell within your verse
Stall history's stilted gait
And fellow poet here's our task,
To score memory with our rhyme
Preserving to posterity
The record of auld lang syne.