Birthday Party Poem by Jan Oskar Hansen

The Birthday Party

23/10 ten minutes two twelve when he will be 75, ten
minutes can take very long; he can get a stroke or a heart attack,
while waiting, he is standing up; few people die when standing up.
There was an English queen who when death was approaching,
refused to go to bed. For a week she was standing up in
a futile attempt to beat death....she lost 11 nil.
It is midnight and the twenty four of October. Ok, he made it, but
must do this every year, living a month longer is important.
Or not! As a child a year took forever, now a year is a windblown leaf
scraping along a dreary road and fall comes around in record time.
Once a girl said she loved him, but that was 60 years ago it doesn’t
matter anymore, but he remembers it well and it is heart-warming
to know this, as a rain drop in a desert,
yet the drop was for him it fertilized his journey through
the domestic landscape of his tedious life.