Tonight the driven snow unearths the dead,
unmaps the land where Burns importuned fame
then rode in red to guarantee his bread -
much more than Truth, he hunted purse and name.

And Adrian, you’d recognise this man 
with mouths to feed and pain a gnawing threat –
who wouldn’t welcome such a pension plan?
As Rabbie says, a man’s a man... and all that. 

So life makes fools of men yet pays them back:
the portrait, post, committee, royal gong –
but you could never tread that beaten track,
nor proffer right the path you deemed as wrong.

A child, you trek across this fresh snow-fall,
redeeming ways we thought impassable.

A poem in memory of poet Adrian Mitchell with whom I recently worked and who died in December 08. The idea for this sonnet came on Burns' Night 09. I was watching a TV programme on Burns while I was escaping the harsh Scottish winter by working in southern France. Burns struggled so much with his ideals and the need to keep his body and the those of wife and children fed. Adrian, too. I finished the poem as the snow was falling past my study window in Scotland in early February. The image in the last couplet came to me as I watched the world outside turn white and all the tracks were covered up by snow, as if it were suddenly possible to make a fresh start...