begin

It's my birthday! I turn thirty-five today, not completely in isolation: I'm going out for a long walk this afternoon to pick up the lemon meringue pie I ordered from a local family-owned bakery that's still open for pick-up orders, and I have plans for a small, low-key party on zoom tonight with some friends and family. I read some fic this morning, and then a bunch of poetry, and although it's fairly overcast, it's also fairly warm, and the sun is peaking out through the clouds. There are still a lot of things worth celebrating.

For almost all of the last thirteen years, I've posted poems by either Auden or Donne—two of my very favorite, best beloved, and remarkably prolific poets—on my birthday. I haven't run out of either Auden or Donne poems (as witness the fact that I already posted a Donne poem earlier this month), but I think it's time to change the tradition. Starting this year, I will be posting poems on my birthday by new-to-me poets, or at least by poets I haven't posted before. We'll see how long this plan lasts (you never know), but let's give it a try. Here's Linda Pastan:

For Anna

Let every tree
burst into blossom
whatever the season.
Let the snow melt
mild as milk
and the new rain wash
the gutters clean
of last year's
prophecies.
Let the guns sweep out
their chambers
and the criminals doze
dreaming themselves
back to infancy.
Let the sailors throw
their crisp white caps
as high as they can
which like so many doves
will return to the ark
with lilacs.
Let the frogs turn
into princes,
the princes to frogs.
Let the madrigals,
let the musical croakings
begin.

—Linda Pastan (b. 1932), "Proclamation at a Birth" from Carnival Evening, 1998, and posted on The Writer's Almanac on April 14, 2012.