What do you give a poet on her birthday?

A box of rare heirloom adjectives?

Balloons filled with helium and saucy alliteration?

Maybe a matched brace of rhyming nouns for the coffee table?

The elusive consummate title refuses to stay on the cake.

And the silver bracelet of meter and metaphor would bend my budget.

No.

None of these are fitting gifts to offer a poet.

So here is a piñata, shaped like a stanza, chock full of random words and left- over grammar.

And because you’re a poet and today is your birthday,

You’ll know what to do.

(For Ginny in my Wednesday Writer’s Group, a very fine poet indeed)

Copyright 2013