I led myself to believe

that I’d write my finest poem in my final hour,

groaning and laughing,

seeping with pain, weeping the numb,

finding all the right words

the way a man sees the horizon from the tip of the earth,

that I’d know what need be said

when poets join the dead,

yet yesterday I fell quite ill

and my mind suffered such a silence shrill

for all the pain that one day wrought

my mind said nothing - a fair word not