A Birthday Prayer

Today is the 10th birthday I have celebrated on this blog, even though I didn't take the time last year to do so. But then, last year was so terrible for so many - and for so many reasons - that it's no wonder I neglected to apostrophize it.


The first birthday I observed, in 2008, I was turning 50 and the post got the attention of a friend I hadn't seen in fourteen years. I quoted Dylan Thomas and Philip Larkin in the post. The following year, in "And Where Could I Marvel My Birthday Away?", I wrote about all the different places in the world, from 1987 until 2009, where I celebrated my birthday. I concluded with a poem by the Alexandrian poet Cavafy, "Ithaka."


In 2010, in "Sunday Morning, May 16," I chose Wallace Stevens to quote at length. In 2011, in "Wish You Were Here," I once again wrote about the itinerant nature of my life, quoting the song from Paint Your Wagon,


Do I know where hell is, hell is in hell-o.
Heaven is good-bye forever it's time for me to go.
I was born under a wand'rin' star, 
A wand'rin', wand'rin' star.


I was being wistful, quoting this time from poems by Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Graves, and concluding: "Here on my Philippine island for another birthday, already having lived in four different houses, I don't know where I will be next year. There is wonder in that speculation, but also some rue. I've stopped here, for the time being, but where I will be in a year I wish I could say, but can't."


In 2012, in "The Ghost of a Birthday Present," I concluded: "All these numbers, ages, and calendar dates are only so many arbitrary conceits. Or so I keep telling myself every time my birthday rolls around. I agree with Oscar Wilde, who died at the comparatively tender age of 46, but who had the foresight to discover that "the tragedy of old age is not that one is old but that one is young."


2013 had me in a speculative mood, offerering "A Question and an Answer." The question was from W. H. Auden, the answer from Mary Oliver. In 2014, in "There Is Something I Can Do," I celebrated the optimistic humanity of Akira Kurosawa's film Ikiru.


In 2015, in the long post "The Voyage In," I felt I'd had enough and wanted out, or at least off my Philippine island. I quoted Homer, Tennyson, Wallace Stevens, and said at the end, "No more, gods. Let me go home." They weren't listening.


Last year my sister, who had waited for my return home for nine years, died. Today is my very first birthday without her somewhere in the world. But there is always the terrible neccessity of saying something, of giving utterance even if it is only of despair of utterances.I looked around me in my ebooks for something to give meaning to my present existence. I struggled. And then, just this morning, I was reading from George Herbert's Poems and I found this:


Bitter-Sweet


Ah, my dear angry Lord,
Since thou dost love, yet strike;
Cast down, yet help afford;
Sure I will do the like.


I will complain, yet praise;
I will bewail, approve;
And all my sour-sweet days
I will lament and love.

Herbert, like most of the men of his age, had a personal relationship with a very real God. The word "prayer" itself has only a rhetorical meaning for me. Yet the beauty of Herbert's words is substantial. 

And so I offer you this prayer, dear reader, as my proof of life.