Poetry Friday: Birthday Poems Mix Tape

I'm a huge supporter of birthdays. In a way, I feel like birthdays are the most important of all holidays. Well, today happens to be mine and once you pass a certain age and become the parent of the certain amount of children, it becomes impossible for birthdays to be as special as they once were. However, I still think everyone deserves to be treated to whatever they want on their birthday. My birthday wishes, the ones that are attainable, are pretty simple...I want to watch whatever I want on TV, and I want to share Merwin and Kunitz with the world.

Forced to choose, I am 99 percent certain that I'd have to pick W.S. Merwin and Stanley Kunitz as my all-time favorite poets. I hardly ever read anything they write that I don't like/love. So on my birthday, I turn to them. Here's a bit of W.S. Merwin's "A Birthday"...

Something continues and     I don't know what to call it
though the language is full of suggestions
in the way of language
                but they are all anonymous
and it's almost your birthday     music next to my bones

these nights we hear the horses     running in the rain
it stops and the moon comes out     and we are still here
the leaks in the roof go on dripping     after the rain has passed
smell of ginger flowers     slips through the dark house
down near the sea     the slow heart of the beacon flashes

Read the rest here. But you should also check out "In the Winter of My Thirty-Eighth Year" by Mr. Merwin:

It sounds unconvincing to say When I was young

Though I have long wondered what it would be like

To be me now

No older at all it seems from here

As far from myself as ever

Walking in fog and rain and seeing nothing

I imagine all the clocks have died in the night

Now no one is looking I could choose my age

It would be younger I suppose so I am older

It is there at hand I could take it

Except for the things I think I would do differently

They keep coming between they are what I am

They have taught me little I did not know when I was young 

For this poem, you can read the rest here.

This may not be the best birthday poem ever, though. That title may belong to Mr. Kunitz's "Passing Through:"

—on my seventy-ninth birthday

Nobody in the widow’s household   

ever celebrated anniversaries.   

In the secrecy of my room

I would not admit I cared

that my friends were given parties.   

Before I left town for school

my birthday went up in smoke   

in a fire at City Hall that gutted   

the Department of Vital Statistics.   

If it weren’t for a census report   

of a five-year-old White Male   

sharing my mother’s address

at the Green Street tenement in Worcester   

I’d have no documentary proof   

that I exist. You are the first,   

my dear, to bully me

into these festive occasions.

Read the rest of this amazing poem here. And if today is your birthday, too, (I'm talking to you, P. Diddy) or even if it's not, please take the time to enjoy these beautiful birthday poems.