Silver as the Rainbow Scales

“I’m afraid of getting older”, that’s what I learned to say
‘Cause society has given me the words to think that way.
The message spins and spirals, “Don’t get saggy, don’t get grey”
But the soft and lovely silvers are now falling on my shoulders.

My mother and my grandma, my great-grandmother too
They wrinkle like the river, they sweeten like the dew
And as silver as the rainbow scales that shimmer purple blue.
How can beauty that is living be anything but true?

So let gravity be my sculptor, let the wind do my hair,
Let me dance in front of people without a care.

Incomprehensible, Big Thief

Happy birthday to me (from me).

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Might Laurel Grow

When we have run our passion’s heat,
Love hither makes his best retreat.
The gods, that mortal beauty chase,
Still in a tree did end their race:
Apollo hunted Daphne so,
Only that she might laurel grow.

—Andrew Marvell, The Garden, 1681

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Douzième

And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern.
You need distance, interval.
The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon.
The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.

― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

Happy twelfth birthday to La Pêche Fraîche.

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Three to The Third

Either a snail’s moist web of moonlight, or someone’s hot breath at four a.m. when the night has been too much, has eaten you whole.
This is my life.
It has been sifted through the bones of my body, through blood. It is all that I have.

—Joy Harjo

Happy birthday to me, from me.

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Dixième

Learn to see, learn to hear, learn to feel, learn to smell, and know that by practice alone can you become expert.

Dr. William Osler

ten years come and gone / I soon run short of fingers / a decade, complete

Happy tenth birthday to La Pêche Fraîche, this little sliver of my soul.
We have reached double digits together, readers, and I humbly thank you.

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Not A Sprint

Like wine through clay,
joy in his blood bursting his heart—the bliss!

Robert Browning, Pheidippides

It is my 26th birthday, today.
More pressing is that my exam, culmination of the last 3 months of my life, is next Friday.
I am therefore resolutely trying to ignore the fact that my birthday has arrived until then.

It has been a marathon, sans doute.

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