Birthday 2015

Birthday  2015

    Susan Kohn Green

It is my birthday today

I am officially seventy four - 

Although, at the six month mark, 

I always up my age to what it will be.

I don’t know why:

Perhaps I am just so delighted to be around. 

Perhaps because it will mean I will be around, 

At least, for the next six months - 

An omen of time,

Perhaps so that people will look at me, amazed, and say, 

“You’re what!  I don’t believe it!”  

My mother was like that; 

When she was ninety people would say, 

“But you don’t look more than eighty”,

When she was ninety- four she stared hard at the doctor -

“What do you mean I’m Getting old?”

In six months I will be seventy five.

It has arrived.  Well, almost. I’m cheating a bit.  

The time on the clock of my silver spoon 

With the stork as it’s handle,

And which is bent from my teething on it

Seventy four years ago, says nearly ten p.m.

But now it is four in the morning. 

I woke a few minutes ago,

Somehow needing something sweet.

I glanced toward the living room

On my sleepy way to the kitchen,

Gasped at an illumination beyond the windows. 

An aerial night-light breathing softly across the room

The heavens were entering. Night was sweeping in. 

I felt my way through the dark of our apartment

To find my camera, always in my purse.

I bumped my knee on a table, 

Groped my way to the windows. 

And there it was;  a full brilliant moon high over the city.

In a sky spreading blue from its haloes into an endless dark. 

A few wispy clouds drifted in semi- circles

Toward it, over it, away from it 

Until it was left alone in the dark. 

In a dark that  - what was it -

Deepest Prussian blue, darkest ultramarine? 

Blues change, skies change.

There was just a hint of dawn at the base, 

A mere blur of orange

Where the sky met the sky scrapers - 

A muddy orange in the south, that would turn to Day, 

A scattering of points -  city lights, window lights  -

In the sharp, flat, black cutouts 

A child could have made from construction paper,

That were the buildings beneath that sky,

My birthday present