October 5: Turning Fifty, Donald Hall, "Affirmation"

Turning fifty.  That is the first time I have written those words today.  It's the first time I've admitted it publicly.  A young friend of mine looked at me earlier today and said, "Wow, half a century."  I felt like an Egyptian pyramid.

I am going to celebrate this evening.  Go out to dinner with my family.  Hear a great poet read.  Maybe imbibe in a little birthday libation.  Because I have earned every wrinkle, gray hair, and freckle on my face.

Saint Marty is ready to celebrate.

Affirmation

by:  Donald Hall

To grow old is to lose everything.
Aging, everybody knows it.
Even when we are young,
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads
when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer
pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,
that began without harm, scatters
into debris on the shore,
and a friend from school drops
cold on a rocky strand.
If a new love carries us
past middle age, our wife will die
at her strongest and most beautiful.
New women come and go. All go.
The pretty lover who announces
that she is temporary
is temporary. The bold woman,
middle-aged against our old age,
sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand.
Another friend of decades estranges himself
in words that pollute thirty years.
Let us stifle under mud at the pond's edge
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything.