The Candles Keep Burning

Even though I've known you for a fairly short time, I've really grown to appreciate your friendship. Salma, I want to dedicate this post for your birthday. Reading your "Temptation Has Kaleidoscope Eyes" paper today reminded me how much you have grown over the past year.

This is the birthday poem used in your own story we read today. So here it goes back to you:


"Someone who favors the freehand strokes of prose,
And finds it easier to string together metaphors
Without being confined
To the left wall of a page,
Usually doesn’t spend the time
Shaping her intangible thoughts
Into tangible words that rhyme.

But a poem is a much more thoughtful and lasting way
Of telling a friend Happy Birthday.
It might not keep your neck warm,
Or put music in your pocket,
But I promise it is easy to tuck inside and lock it
In a place where only a poem
Can spread you out like a stretch of ocean;
And rising from beneath
Is a heartthrob for every league of emotion
Until all you see are hundreds of chests heaving,
Creating the movement of the surface.
It is a rhythmic pulsing you can’t ignore
As it rises and falls,
Rises and falls,
Then ebbs across a sandcastle shore.

I hope you spend the next year of your life
Drowning in moments of genius,
Speed-skating across the black ice
That hazards the sidewalks of life
Where you hop scotch through notes of music
To create a masterpiece of movement
With every strum of your guitar.

Take the time to smile at every gray-haired couple
Slowly making their way down an antique street;
Wondering how many birthdays it took them
Before they truly realized
That candles never glow
Any less brighter for you
Than they did the year before.

Somewhere between
The stars spackled in the sky
And the starfish clinging to the ocean floor,
I have ice cream sandwiched you
Right in the middle.
And little by little
You’ll come to realize
A birthday isn’t a birthday
Without some poetic rhythm
To jump start that birthday boy [well for you, maybe girl ;) ] smile. "




Happy Birthday Salma! =)