Elegy – Sweet Afton
It was just another brand
Just another cigarette
Nothing of which to be proud
Or noteworthy, but yet
To those who with up have grown
And those who it have smoked
Lament its passing in these tough times
And nostalgia it has provoked.
It was my mothers cigarette
For all the years when I was young
No filters for her, oh no, no way
Raw tobacco upon the tongue
And I a child, on its boxes drew
Pictures in my childish play
And an artist I was in my own mind
As I drew in my boyish way
Faces and cars and all sorts of things
Can captured imagination at the time
And on the front I read words of Burns
And his Sweet Afton rhyme.
And from these boxes, so simple design
I discovered of culture a part
Of which little interest in whom I might have shown
A love of Burns work it planted in my heart.
And as the years on my mothers life
Battling hard and strong in frailer health
She to time and to eternal sleep succumbed
As Death steadily crept in by stealth
She passed in her time, as all must do
All things they come to an end
Withrawn were the cigarettes she so did love
While playing cards, to smoke, the hours spend.