A Wednesday Morning In June A Birthday Poem Poem by Daniel Brick

A Wednesday morning in June,
day has begun with a cloudless
blue sky, sunlight shining
over everything with equal splendor,
a match with Monday and Tuesday.
Is this fair weather a good habit
recently acquired by the month itself?

A Wednesday morning in June,
the middle of the week, the middle
of the calendar year. How neatly
sometimes things fall into place,
and it seems as if they were meant
to be just so, perhaps a small but
vital element of the world's structure,

just sufficient reality to make us
trust the whole of which we know only
parts. A Wednesday morning in June,
the seventh of that month, but I wait
for the tenth, with no unseemly haste,
because on that day I will turn seventy.

I should by now be accustomed
to the way time circles through space
for those three hundred plus days, and
unerringly arrives at this point,
my seventieth year to Heaven, as Dylan Thomas
put it in a poem he wrote when he reached thirty.
Like him I hope to sing my heart's truth again.

Or rather unlike him I will give voice
to a Poem of the Mind. A Wednesday morning
in June is neither a title nor a theme:
it is a prod, a provocation, a stimulus
for me to withdraw from further blather
about the day and its weather, and seek
the words that will express my inner climate.