A Handful of Birthday Poems

from On Turning Ten

You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.

But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never fell so solemnly
against the side of my tree house,
and my bicycle never leaned against the garage
as it does today,
all the dark blue speed drained out of it.

. . .

It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I could shine.

—Billy Collins

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Optimism

More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs—all this resinous, unretractable earth.

—Jane Hirshfield

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Poem in October

  It was my thirtieth year to heaven     

Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood        

  And the mussel pooled and the heron                

        Priested shore           

   The morning beckon     

With water praying and call of seagull and rook     

And the knock of sailing boats on the webbed wall           

   Myself to set foot                

      That second        

In the still sleeping town and set forth.       

 

  My birthday began with the water-     

Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name        

  Above the farms and the white horses                 

      And I rose            

    In a rainy autumn     

And walked abroad in shower of all my days     

High tide and the heron dived when I took the road            

    Over the border                

      And the gates        

Of the town closed as the town awoke.     

   

  A springful of larks in a rolling    

Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling        

  Blackbirds and the sun of October                

        Summery            

     On the hill's shoulder,     

Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly     

Come in the morning where I wandered and listened            

   To the rain wringing                

      Wind blow cold        

In the wood faraway under me.  

      

  Pale rain over the dwindling harbour     

And over the sea wet church the size of a snail        

  With its horns through mist and the castle                

        Brown as owls             

     But all the gardens     

Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales     

Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.

     There could I marvel                

        My birthday        

  Away but the weather turned around.     

   

  It turned away from the blithe country     

And down the other air and the blue altered sky        

  Streamed again a wonder of summer                

        With apples             

     Pears and red currants     

And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's     

Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother             

     Through the parables                

        Of sunlight        

  And the legends of the green chapels    

    

  And the twice told fields of infancy     

That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.        

  These were the woods the river and the sea                

        Where a boy             

     In the listening     

Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy     

To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.            

     And the mystery                

        Sang alive        

  Still in the water and singing birds.    

    

  And there could I marvel my birthday     

Away but the weather turned around. And the true        

  Joy of the long dead child sang burning                

        In the sun.             

     It was my thirtieth        

  Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon        

  Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.             

     O may my heart's truth                

        Still be sung        

  On this high hill in a year's turning.

—Dylan Thomas

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Ribbons