Birthdays.

To have grown a year
in a single day.
All the experience I’ll ever need,
I’m sure.

Birthday candles and cakes
and KAT scans.
A sepia-aged picture of a wooden swing
with a short young lad,
with a young lads grin.
And all the trouble in the world
resting on his mothers hat that he wears
on his soft brown head,
like a straw and satin halo.

That’s innocence in his eyes
incase you didn’t recognise.
His simplicity, naiveté
on a cold day in September.
His archaic virtues,
incase you don’t remember.

All this on an old piece of paper
with the dog eared corner,
that you forgot about,
and let slip away
down the back of the bookshelves
’till they came to take it all away.

But in the meanwhile
life has grown,
green and lush.

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