Unparty

              Unparty

Villon and Byron, summing up their days,
took stock of what they’d been, and were, at thirty,
feeling mature, or worse. I at that phase
was still a bumbling boy; perhaps at forty
a man (with wife and child), amassing praise
for stuff I’d done, from one or other party.
Now all that’s gone; alone, at seventy-five
I meditate on merely being alive.

Since twenty-one, I’ve never understood
why anyone should celebrate being older
by one more year, and guzzle wine and food,
laughing because you’re on the way to moulder
yet more in the next twelvemonth. I would brood
alone, on birthdays, looking round my shoulder
at the grim guest of bone. I don’t feel hearty
at prospect of another birthday party.

Time is no friend. It’s not the length of days
that we should celebrate, but gleams of joy:
a second here or there, a sudden blaze
of beauty, or of love, when to the boy
or man or woman, there bursts from the haze
of greyer life a gold without alloy.
The glories of some minutes that were mine –
to these, at seventy-five, I pledge my wine.