Mostly,
I see friends loving their birth-day.
Some wear it as a cloak,
or
a long loved crown
and spend their day dancing in
glory.
But
I love the quiet before my
birthday,
the preceeding week
the sunrise and
sunset
the twenty four before anyone thinks of anything as
my day.
It is as if all possibility stands before me,
as if I
distinctly
remember another time when
I could not breathe on
my own
and there was no
agenda but to live.
It feels like a get-out-of
jail-free card
a moment out of time
and my mother is still close
enough to beat her
heart in rhythm with
mine
and I alone am celebrating
what she and I
will go through tomorrow
no cake
no candles
just a glimmer of a memory that
today,
the day before I was birthed,
is when I made the most difficult and beautiful
declaration
I have ever
known.
The day before my birth was when I
decided to
come out into
the sun and
live
apart from the
comfort
apart from the
warmth
all possibilities to fall or fly
all possibilites start today.
