Collection

Birthday Poems

Poems for milestone birthdays and those in-between.

BY The Editors

Photograph of birthday candles spelling happy birthday
Photo courtesy of Will Clayton via Flickr

Tuck these poems into birthday cards or give yourself the gift of reflection.

Childhood
  • Littlest digit, you’ve got the world by the handle.
  • Light bulbs on a birthday cake.
    What a difference that would make!
  • A birthday party and he’ll have nothing to do with the inflatable
    castles rented and set up on the lawn, only wants to run all
    afternoon,
  • “What is this lovely world, and who am I?”
Teens And Twenties
  • Your liberation
    twelve years ago today is the occasion
    you and your friends are celebrating now
    behind a door that’s firmly shut.
  • you never should dally with any young man
    who does any one of the following things:
  • For my birthday thrust into the adult and actual:
    expected to perform the action, not to ponder
  • I shimmy and slip by on pure fool chance.
Thirties
  • May I never be afraid
                              especially of myself   
  • I don’t act silly any more.
    And because of it I have to hear from so-called friends:
    “You’ve changed. You used to be so crazy so great.”
  •             me and you
    coming from the same place.
  • My spring is gone

    and summer’s upon me,
    rude in its ripening.
Forties & Fifties
Growing Older
  •             Indeed, I was a few months older than Cheerios
    for today, the newspaper announced,
    was the seventieth birthday of Cheerios
  • It’s the physics
    of acceleration I mind,
    the way time speeds up
  • Here’s to the next year, to the best year yet;
    To mixed joys, to my harum-scarum prime;
  • it’s time for me to practice
    growing old. The way I look
    at it, I’m passing through a phase:
    gradually I’m changing to a word.
For Parents
  • Yesterday I drove my little mother for hours
    through wet snow. Her eightieth birthday.
    What she wanted was that ride with me—
    shopping, gossiping, mulling old grievances,
  • I did what a child does
    when he’s given something to keep.
    I kissed my father.
  • I learned from my mother how to love
    the living
  • What did I know, what did I know
    of love’s austere and lonely offices?
  •                                              basking in the light  
    and love that would fall down on me when I  
    handed her the box and she untied the bow to save
Parties & Presents
  •             how an argument once ended when his father
    seized a lit birthday cake in both hands
    and hurled it out a second-story window.
  • That’s it; that’s how it is; everyone standing around as if just out of the pool,
    drying off, standing around, that’s it, standing, talking,