Birthday poems
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My Dream
© Christina Georgina Rossetti
What can it mean? you ask. I answer not
For meaning, but myself must echo, What?
And tell it as I saw it on the spot.
Parliament Hill Fields
© Sylvia Plath
On this bald hill the new year hones its edge.
Faceless and pale as china
The round sky goes on minding its business.
Your absence is inconspicuous;
Nobody can tell what I lack.
Turning Forty by Kevin Griffith: American Life in Poetry #13 Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-200
© Ted Kooser
Birthdays, especially those which mark the passage of a decade, are occasions not only for celebration, but for reflection. In "Turning Forty," Ohio poet Kevin Griffith conveys a confusion of sentiments. The speaker feels a sense of peace at forty, but recalls a more powerful, more confident time in his life.
My Birthday
© John Greenleaf Whittier
Beneath the moonlight and the snow
Lies dead my latest year;
The winter winds are wailing low
Its dirges in my ear.
For Whittiers Seventieth Birthday
© Oliver Wendell Holmes
I BELIEVE that the copies of verses I've spun,
Like Scheherezade's tales, are a thousand and one;
You remember the story,--those mornings in bed,--
'T was the turn of a copper,--a tale or a head.
To F. W. N. A Birthday Offering
© John Henry Newman
Dear Frank, this morn has usher'd in
The manhood of thy days;
A boy no more, thou must begin
To choose thy future ways;
To brace thy arm, and nerve thy heart,
For maintenance of a noble part.
On My Birthday, July 21
© Matthew Prior
I, MY dear, was born to-day--
So all my jolly comrades say:
They bring me music, wreaths, and mirth,
And ask to celebrate my birth:
466. Ode for General Washingtons Birthday
© Robert Burns
NO Spartan tube, no Attic shell,
No lyre Æolian I awake;
Tis libertys bold note I swell,
Thy harp, Columbia, let me take!
201. Birthday Ode for 31st December, 1787
© Robert Burns
AFAR 1 the illustrious Exile roams,
Whom kingdoms on this day should hail;
An inmate in the casual shed,
On transient pitys bounty fed,
438. Impromptu on Mrs. Riddells Birthday
© Robert Burns
OLD Winter, with his frosty beard,
Thus once to Jove his prayer preferred:
What have I done of all the year,
To bear this hated doom severe?
395. Sonnet on the Authors Birthday
© Robert Burns
SING on, sweet thrush, upon the leafless bough,
Sing on, sweet bird, I listen to thy strain,
See aged Winter, mid his surly reign,
At thy blythe carol, clears his furrowed brow.
happiness
© Rg Gregory
happiness is the stuff of birthdays
and the coming of sweet things
when they are not expected
two thursdays
© Rg Gregory
when the doctor came on a monday
he looked at my mother and said
there's something seriously wrong here -
she's had a stroke - she's almost dead
Aspiring Miss DeLaine
© Francis Bret Harte
(A CHEMICAL NARRATIVE)
Certain facts which serve to explain
doughnut denial
© Rg Gregory
fancy having a birthday on a thursday
when you do the buying of the doughnuts
and others lick their sticky fingers
thinking good old karen letting
us share the eating of her birthday
jack beyond the digits
© Rg Gregory
so here we are at last at the ten-boy
never to be the single-figure-aged-again boy
and all the trailing clouds that cling to the not-big child
can be blown away - you're up in your own sky now
clear-blue on some days (if on others windy and wild)
two crocodiles gossip by the banks of the thames at abingdon
© Rg Gregory
two old lazy crocodiles are basking by the water
they get round to talk about the macdonalds' daughtergemini gemini
have you ever set eyes on young stephaniejiminy jiminy
who lives here in abingdon - the one who is twogemini gemini
i thank you God for this most amazing
© Edward Estlin Cummings
i thank You God for this most amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
wich is natural which is infinite which is yes
