Birthday

It will be my birthday in May
and the year is already
creeping away into my past,
to join those

that stand, silently and
well disciplined, in line
with the eighty-six others that have,
chronologically, gone before.

Sometimes though, they congregate
in small close-knit groups
to discuss the ways in which
they have influenced my life.

The wartime forties divide
into two small groups to compare
impressions of army service with those
of a belated academic undergraduacy,

while the fifties, sixties and seventies,
each held together,
like the twenties and thirties,
by some invisible internal thread,

move backwards and forwards along the line
seeking memorabilia from other pre-retirement years
in anticipation of the coming of a new millenium
and the continuity of my ageing.

Drifting across this vast parade ground,
mists sometimes obscure their movement
until, a bright shaft of memory
reveals them as they trade reminiscences.