WHY DO YOU STAY UP SO LATE? By Don Paterson

remember that day you lost two years ago 

at the rockpool where you sat and played the jeweler 

with all those stones you’d stolen from the shore? 

Most of them went dark and nothing more, 

but sometimes one would blink the secret color 

it had locked up somewhere in its stony sleep. 

This is how you knew the ones to keep. 

 So I collect the dull things of the day 

in which I see some possibility 

but which are dead and which have the surprise 

I don’t know, and I’ve no pool to help me tell–

so I look at them and look at them until 

one thing makes a mirror in my eyes 

then I paint it with the tear to make it bright. 

This is why I sit up through the night. 

 – Posted (badly) from my iPhone