Birthday Week

This is a week full of birthdays! Well, of course, lots of people were probably born this week, so you can all celebrate with us at our house. Birthdays include my daughter, my grandson, my best friend, my husband, and my daughter-in-law. That's a lot in one week.

In keeping with National Poetry Month here are a couple of birthday poems to celebrate.

The Birthday Child
By Rose Fyleman

Everything's been different,
All the day long.
Lovely things have happened,
Nothing has gone wrong.
Nobody has scolded me,
Everyone has smiled.
Isn't it delicious
To be a birthday child?


Birthday
by Louise Gluck

There was an apple tree in the yard –
this would have been
forty years ago – behind,
only meadows. Drifts
of crocus in the damp grass.
I stood at that window:
late April. Spring
flowers in the neighbor’s yard.
How many times, really, did the tree
flower on my birthday,
the exact day, not
before, not after? Substitution
of the immutable
for the shifting, the evolving.
Substitution of the image
for relentless earth. What
do I know of this place,
the role of the tree for decades
taken by a bonsai, voices
rising from the tennis courts –
Fields. Smell of the tall grass, new cut.
As one expects of a lyric poet.
We look at the world once, in childhood.
The rest is memory.