“Robert burns and Elizabeth Payton”

In Ayrshire’s dawn, where heather blooms unfold,  
A ploughman rose, his voice both brave and bold,  
Robert Burns, with humble, weathered pen,  
Spun songs of love and toil and honest men.  
His verses, like the barley, grew and swayed,  
In Scotland’s fields, where dreams and hearts were made,  
A lass would step from time’s less chronicled page—  
Elizabeth Payton, young, of thoughtful age.

Her name is not inscribed on every stone,  
Yet in Robert’s world, she walked—unknown,  
A gentle specter in his early air,  
A muse whose quiet kindness lingered there.  
Some say she held his hand beside the stream,  
Or shared with him a brief and secret dream,  
A laughter soft upon the reddened sky,  
A fleeting comfort, as the years slipped by.

O, Burns, the bard who courted countless fates,  
Who wrote of spring, of love’s capricious gates,  
Did Payton’s eyes, beneath the hawthorn white,  
Kindle those lines of longing in the night?  
Or did she drift—a memory distilled—  
Among the bonnie fields the poet tilled?  
No ceaseless torch or fervent, blazing fire,  
But subtle as the dew, or robin’s choir.

So let us toast the lass, unknown to fame,  
Who wandered through the margins of his name,  
And Burns himself—a star that cannot pale—  
For both are part of Scotland’s whispered tale.  
Where verses cross and gentle stories blend,  
Their shadows meet, and time itself may bend,  
For poetry is shaped by light unseen—  
By silent hearts, and what has never been.

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