HER BIRTHDAY

Her Birthday

by Marianne McNamara

He waits for her on sheets that need changing.

Afterward she sprawls in her favorite chair,

listens to the silence, watches the white moonlight

stretch across the porch floor and travel up the wall.

It's early September, her birthday;

the musky smell of ripeness fills the air.

She savors her life in sections

like pieces of an orange,

thinks briefly of her twenties

when everything was possible

the future a clean white page.

Delights in her thirties when her world

was messy and demanding but completely glorious

brimming with babies, their milky-sweet bodies

pressed warmly against her own.

She treasures those years above the others.

Her forties pass in a blur, day after predictable day

of car-pools and committees.

Now in her fifties she's rejoined the work-force,

collects a paycheck, discovered a new sense of freedom,

is filled with an energy she has not experienced before.

And finally, she has time to be thoughtful about simple things.