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.
