Birthday Wishes Poem
It’s my birthday (and Dottie’s half-birthday)! And this prompt is for yours (but you can do it any day!)
The result will be a poem with the number of lines of the age you are turning/about to turn.
First, divide that number in half. Write that number of wishes (for yourself, others, your daemon, the world). You can then rearrange in any order etc. so that all odd number lines of the poems stem from these wishes (this can mean a gesture, image, or act of fantasy, wonder, completion, desire, beauty or surprise. The more varied they are the better).
For the same number of lines, write the story of your birth in moments, or for example 22 statements about your birth, real or imagined. The even lines move forward or backward in time: the story (biographical or mythical) of your own birth. You can leave room for what you know and what you don’t. You can repeat the word “then” at the beginning of the line. You can become your own creator. You can write from a bird’s eye view. You can address or question a witness, a parent, a sibling, a room.
Note: If the age you are turning is odd (say 33), you may choose to include two half truths or white lies in place of one wish and one moment. So you would write 16 wishes, 16 moments, and two half truths.
The poem should end with one extra couplet in which you are born again in present tense in the penultimate line followed by a last line that refracts, repeats, questions, or otherwise returns to the wish from line one. Has it come true? Has the wish changed? Has the wish wished you?
Blow out the candles by breaking your lines and stanzas in surprising places of wonder or wound, possibility or pleasure. These might be trick candles.
What has been the greatest surprise of your life so far? This is your title. Now go eat some cake :)
Elizabeth Metzger is the author of The Going Is Forever (Milkweed, 2025) and Lying In, as well as The Spirit Papers, winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry. Her poems have been published in the New Yorker, Paris Review, Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Nation, and Poem-a-Day. Her essays have been published in Boston Review, Guernica, Conjunctions, PN Review, and Literary Hub, among others. She is a poetry editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and a co-editor of PROMPT.