Birthday poems
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Candle Hat
© Billy Collins
In most self-portraits it is the face that dominates:
Cezanne is a pair of eyes swimming in brushstrokes,
Van Gogh stares out of a halo of swirling darkness,
Rembrant looks relieved as if he were taking a breather
from painting The Blinding of Sampson.
Plutonian Ode
© Allen Ginsberg
IWhat new element before us unborn in nature? Is there
a new thing under the Sun?
At last inquisitive Whitman a modern epic, detonative,
Scientific theme
Shepherd And Goatherd
© William Butler Yeats
Shepherd. He that was best in every country sport
And every country craft, and of us all
Most courteous to slow age and hasty youth,
Is dead.
His Phoenix
© William Butler Yeats
There is a queen in China, or maybe it's in Spain,
And birthdays and holidays such praises can be heard
Of her unblemished lineaments, a whiteness with no stain,
That she might be that sprightly girl trodden by a bird;
A Ramble in St. James's Park
© John Wilmot
The second was a Grays Inn wit,
A great inhabiter of the pit,
Where critic-like he sits and squints,
Steals pocket handkerchiefs, and hints
From 's neighbor, and the comedy,
To court, and pay, his landlady.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
© Henry Van Dyke
Dear Aldrich, now November's mellow days
Have brought another Festa round to you,
You can't refuse a loving-cup of praise
From friends the fleeting years have bound to you.
A Prayer for a Mother's Birthday
© Henry Van Dyke
Lord Jesus, Thou hast known
A mother's love and tender care:
And Thou wilt hear, while for my own
Mother most dear I make this birthday prayer.
A Health to Mark Twain
© Henry Van Dyke
At his Birthday FeastWith memories old and wishes new
We crown our cups again,
And here's to you, and here's to you
With love that ne'er shall wane!
Punctuality
© Lewis Carroll
Man Naturally loves delay,
And to procrastinate;
Business put off from day to day
Is always done to late.
To My Father on His Birthday
© Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Amidst the days of pleasant mirth,
That throw their halo round our earth;
September Notebook: Stories
© Robert Hass
Driving up 80 in the haze, they talked and talked.
(Smoke in the air shimmering from wildfires.)
His story was sad and hers was roiled, troubled.
The Author to His Body on Their Fifteenth Birthday, 29 ii 80
© Howard Nemerov
“There’s never a dull moment in the human body.”
—The Insight Lady
Faustine
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
Ave Faustina Imperatrix, morituri te salutant.
Lean back, and get some minutes' peace;
Let your head lean
Back to the shoulder with its fleece
Of locks, Faustine.
Afterword
© Louise Gluck
Reading what I have just written, I now believe
I stopped precipitously, so that my story seems to have been
slightly distorted, ending, as it did, not abruptly
but in a kind of artificial mist of the sort
sprayed onto stages to allow for difficult set changes.
Cheerios
© Billy Collins
One bright morning in a restaurant in Chicago
as I waited for my eggs and toast,
I opened the Tribune only to discover
that I was the same age as Cheerios.
Wingfoot Lake
© Rita Dove
to God.) Where she came from
was the past, 12 miles into town
where nobody had locked their back door,
and Goodyear hadn’t begun to dream of a park
under the company symbol, a white foot
sprouting two small wings.
Death Of Queen Mercedes
© James Russell Lowell
Hers all that Earth could promise or bestow,--
Youth, Beauty, Love, a crown, the beckoning years,
Poem for My Twentieth Birthday
© Kenneth Koch
Passing the American graveyard, for my birthday
the crosses stuttering, white on tropical green,
the years quick focus of faces I do not remember . . .
Enough is as Good as a Feast
© Harry Graham
Who would not willingly forsake
Kindred and Home, without a fuss,
For Icing from a Birthday Cake,
Or juicy fat Asparagus,
And journey over countless seas
For New Potatoes and Green Peas?
