A Meditation on Turning Fifty

This week, with the whole country covered in bunting and Union Jacks (how kind of everyone to decorate for my birthday), I celebrate reaching my half-century.  As a change from the clangour of royal wedding bells and revelations, here's a small poetic insight into how it feels to me....

Meditation on Turning Fifty

Why April is the cruellest month—well,

I’ve never understood Tom’s take on that.

I’m more of a Geoffrey goodwif, me.

My April has sweet showers, is mild, beneficent,

full of thrusting green and skylarks.

But if any April were to be cruel, it would be this.

Here I stand, damp and peeling

out of my first half-century carapace,

skin sloughing like a fat, burnt snake,

whirling and gurgling down the drain;

stripped and flaking evidence

of the life I’ve led so far.

Will the other side of April

be a slow slide down into darkness--

fifty dulled roots in a dead lilac land?  No.

I defy sad Tom and his heap of broken images.

Instead, I shall wear stockings of a fine scarlet red

to adorn my pilgrimage to winter.