writing the birthday poem

Writing the Birthday Poem

Each year I write a birthday poem (July 31, 1943), and whether the poem is fairly good or not so good hasn't been a cause for anxiety.  The one for 2019 is not cooperating.  It is resisting, and it demanded two preludes:

Prelude for Poem 76

The face challenges the mirror; the mirror, the face.

The space between has no wind, only an absence,

the given probabilities  gambling

in a vacuum of grief and alleged transgressions.

Sirens of moonset

become arrivals:

ancestors burning

signals of returning,

of unrequested volitions,

you deem, in jest,

a mystery of performing.

Are you now bereft of shame

as David Walker and James Joyce speak your name?

                May 17, 2019

Second prelude for Poem 76

Old gods

purge grave logic

reverse the hearse

make life best death

in the bargain.

What you speak

a trillion eons

I am.

                                June 4, 2019

And to minimize discord, I scratched out the unnecessary lines   ----"story thrice-created/undreamed horrors/ lodged in a mind"

When some  writers I know who have  survived  beyond the over-rated "three score and ten," they permit themselves to think it is of little consequence that their writing is as thin as their bodies are overweight.  I do not permit myself to become one of them.  I agree with Poem 76 that I must not join that crew, or book passage on a ship of fools young and old on their way to whatever.  Poem 76 shall arrive and donate its teaspoon of water to an ocean of poetry in a moment of  intelligent silence.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            June 5, 2019