How do you celebrate your birthday?
Is it something you look forward to each year, counting the days and making special plans? Do you return to the same landscapes each year, making a yearly pilgrimage to the coast or the cabin by the lake? Does a good friend have a birthday near yours? Do you celebrate together each year? Maybe you treat yourself to a new book or a bottle of wine. Do you make time for a grand gesture like a class or a writing retreat? Or do you create a memorable artist date for yourself at your favorite museum or cafe?
Are there aspects of getting older that you heartily embrace?
Try It
Freewrite for 10 minutes on these themes, perhaps using the repeated phrase “I remember…” to shape some of your thoughts into a poem. Consider how the formal aspects–line breaks, rhythms, word choice, rhyme scheme–add emotional resonance to your personal observations.
Featured Poem
Thanks to everyone who participated in last week’s poetry prompt. Here’s a poem we enjoyed from Katie:
Peridot, gemstone
found on every continent
poor man’s emerald
—Katie
Photo by John Drake , Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Kortney Garrison.
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Katie says
Kortney,
Thank you so much for featuring my peridot haiku:)
Gratefully,
Katie
Kortney Garrison says
Thank you for writing along with us, Katie! Always happy to see your contributions. 🙂
Laurie Flanigan says
Nice Haiku, Katie! I’m glad I got to read it here along with all your intriguing celebration suggestions, Kortney. I think I might try out a few. 🙂
Katie says
Thank you, Laurie:) Here is one I wrote to celebrate my daughter who turned 29 on Earth Day:
twenty-nine years young
kind, smart, important to us
favoritest gal
AND this cinquain:
daughter
extrordinare
totally unique
and remarkable, one awesome
woman
Laurie Flanigan says
I love those. Thanks for sharing, Katie.
Kortney Garrison says
So…I had to look up cinquain. That’s how limited my formal knowledge is! (Here’s an excellent infographic in case others are curious: https://www.tweetspeakpoetry.com/2017/09/30/infographic-write-cinquain-poem/)
My son turned nine yesterday. Here’s a cinquain for him:
Nico–
our first born boy.
Heart like the sun, bulging
sketchbooks, blocks and puzzles, Lego
master!
And a poem written my Nicolas…
Cherry blossoms,
cats, and crows–
two of these
irritate my nose!
Katie says
Thanks Laurie and Kortney.
Like your cinquain for Nico, Kortney and his poem too!!
Playing with words is SO FUN isn’t it?
and thanks for the infographic link:)
Kameron says
I am not sure if I am supposed to write this in poetry format or not (ack!)… but my very favorite part of aging is the gentle but genuine paradigm shift in what I thought was important as a young person to what I KNOW is important as an *ahem* “older” person. It actually turns out that they are very, very different things. Hope has become more valuable to me as I have gotten older for it is the reason I throw back the covers and swing my legs out of bed in the morning.
Assumptions dissolve
Gently
and firmly
replaced by
Unwavering unshakable Truth
and realest Reality
Katie says
Thank you for sharing, Kameron.
My perspective has certainly changed from when I was younger.
Appreciate your poem of Hope:)
Rick Maxson says
What Will You Remember
What will you remember, when again
the sun will warm you, or the rain,
with some surviving sense of place,
will find you, like tears that touched your face
in a life once lived—full joy and pain?
Like drops of water on a windowpane,
our lives converge and so are fain
to seem, like the swell and settle of the sea.
Is déjà vu a memory—another time, another me—
or just some trickster in the brain?
All tossed in time, all love and war a skein,
moments like an unforgettable refrain
will come to touch us in our sleep,
like phosphorescence from the deep
and leave a dream we can’t explain.
Kortney Garrison says
Love the interplay between the internal music of the lines and the end rhyme…last week’s Rita Dove poem from Every Day Poems has me in raptures by the way!
Rick Maxson says
Thank you, Kortney.