Fritz Sonderland, “Grandmother’s Birthday Cake”
Yesterday I celebrated my 62nd birthday. Today we celebrate my father’s 90th. I very much enjoy the leisurely journey that Welsh poet R. S. Thomas describes in his poem “Ninetieth Birthday.” The poem is about visiting a 90-year-old woman and in choosing to walk rather than take a car, the speaker takes a close look at the changing landscape and the passage of time. Aging is to be savored, not quickly passed by.
The only part of the poem that does not apply to my father is the final line. His words continue to be wise, and his listeners don’t lean across the abyss only to be kind. Instead we learn about History when it was big, from the Great Depression to World War II to the Civil Rights Movement. The bridges we build to those times are tenuous.
Ninetieth Birthday
By R. S. Thomas
You go up the long track
That will take a car, but is best walked
On slow foot, noting the lichen
That writes history on the page
Of the grey rock. Trees are about you
At first, but yield to the green bracken,
The nightjar’s house: you can hear it spin
On warm evenings; it is still now
In the noonday heat, only the lesser
Voices sound, blue-fly and gnat
And the stream’s whisper. As the road climbs,
You will pause for breath and the far sea’s
Signal will flash, till you turn again
To the steep track, buttressed with cloud.
And there at the top that old woman,
Born almost a century back
In that stone farm, awaits your coming;
Waits for the news of the lost village
She thinks she knows, a place that exists
In her memory only.
You bring her greeting
And praise for having lasted so long
With time’s knife shaving the bone.
Yet no bridge joins her own
World with yours, all you can do
Is lean kindly across the abyss
To hear words that were once wise.