A note on John Keats

Only an apothecary poet
would write to a friend

and commend him
to the care of heaven

He who teetered on tiptoe
to gaze upon things from on high

who stood three years from
the abyss of death and yet wrote

of the nightingale’s unending song
to record the truth of its beauty 

In the silence of the dark night
who would dare to compare

the brilliance or the stature
of the brightest of eternal stars ?

John Lyons