So What's Another Birthday?

So What’s Another Birthday?


As once again in this spiral dance of years
comes the day I celebrate my induction into these
human ranks, I find it right to think of days
spent uselessly under spreading oaks and lavished
upon lessons of unending indolence.

I was a rotten child.

Lazy and filled with lasting youth I was content
to waste the years in a fixated trance of time-enough.
Only now as the celebratory day brings the double-
digit desire for the reducing lie do I realize the depths
of my slumber.

I was a wonderful child.

Basking in the sunlight summer of potential I
could spend half a day watching a caterpillar
weave it’s prison doom and set itself toward
mighty transformation. In such importance
did I hold that world that even now I remember
the passing parade.

I am still a child.

Running cartwheels in my mind, I explore the joy
of wonderment that still confounds me and teaches me
what little humility I have. I spend my days skipping
in the bliss of eternal discovery.

I will still be a child,

as I step, eventually, into that other beyond, and
partake of what is to be. With stubborn will I
refuse to surrender the playing boy who keeps
my humor victorious over the humus. I will
always crave the new.

I will get older, but I will never grow up.

Stuart Andrew Marshall Tanner