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| Traditional English birthday greeting |
Is that a birthday? 'tis, alas! too clear;
“I grabbed a pile of dust, and holding it up, foolishly asked for as many birthdays as the grains of dust, I forgot to ask that they be years of youth. ”
― Ovid, Metamorphoses
― Ovid, Metamorphoses
Midweek Motif ~ Birthday(s)
It is either your birthday
or your un-birthday.
And someone else's as well.
Your Challenge: Write a new poem giving yourself or someone else a birthday gift on a specific birthday.
(Or remember one already given/received.)
A BIRTHDAY
by: Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)
My heart is like a singing bird
- Whose nest is in a water'd shoot;
- My heart is like an apple-tree
- Whose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit;
- My heart is like a rainbow shell
- That paddles in a halcyon sea;
- My heart is gladder than all these,
- Because my love is come to me.
- Raise me a daïs of silk and down;
- Hang it with vair and purple dyes;
- Carve it in doves and pomegranates,
- And peacocks with a hundred eyes;
- Work it in gold and silver grapes,
- In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys;
- Because the birthday of my life
- Is come, my love is come to me.
35? I have been looking forward
To you for many years now
So much so that
I feel you and I are old
Friends and so on this day, 35
I propose a toast to
Me and You
35? From this day on
I swear before the bountiful
Osiris that
If I ever
If I EVER
Try to bring out the
Best in folks again I
Want somebody to take me
Outside and kick me up and
Down the sidewalk or
Sit me in a corner with a
Funnel on my head
. . . .
Read the rest HERE
Related Poem Content Details
The black kitten cries at her bowl
meek meek and the gray one glowers
from the windowsill. My hand on the can
to serve them. First day of spring.
Yesterday I drove my little mother for hours
through wet snow. Her eightieth birthday.
What she wanted was that ride with me—
shopping, gossiping, mulling old grievances,
1930, 1958, 1970.
How cruel the world has been to her,
how uncanny she’s survived it.
In her bag, a birthday card
from “my Nemesis,” signed Sincerely
with love—“Why is she doing this to me?”
she demands, “She hates me.”
“Maybe
she loves you” is and isn’t what Mother
wants to hear, maybe after sixty years
the connection might as well be love.
Might well be love, I don’t say—
I won’t spoil her birthday,
my implacable mother.
. . . .
Read the Rest HERE.
For K.R. On Her Sixtieth Birthday
by Richard Wilbur
Blow out the candles of your cake.
They will not leave you in the dark,
Who round with grace this dusky arc
Of the grand tour which souls must take.
You who have sounded William Blake,
And the still pool, to Plato's mark,
Blow out the candles of your cake.
They will not leave you in the dark.
Yet, for your friends' benighted sake,
Detain your upward-flying spark;
Get us that wish, though like the lark
You whet your wings till dawn shall break:
Blow out the candles of your cake.
Who round with grace this dusky arc
Of the grand tour which souls must take.
You who have sounded William Blake,
And the still pool, to Plato's mark,
Blow out the candles of your cake.
They will not leave you in the dark.
Yet, for your friends' benighted sake,
Detain your upward-flying spark;
Get us that wish, though like the lark
You whet your wings till dawn shall break:
Blow out the candles of your cake.
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in the spirit of the community.
(Next week Susan's Midweek Motif will be ~ Compromise )
(Next week Susan's Midweek Motif will be ~ Compromise )
