birthday poem

At some point, maybe around the age of fourteen, they stop putting the exact number of candles in your cake and replace them with a few that just signify the number. I suppose it makes sense because the idea of placing fifteen or more individual candles onto a cake and lighting them all feels tedious. And as the years pass you’ll reflect on all the ground you covered yourself, how you spread your life out, each year a single candle on the surface of your time spent here. You’ll remember all the times you ate cake, all the times you allowed your heart to break. You’ll struggle to remember each and every one of the faces that have made you smile, but you’ll try. You’ll grow older and more grey and more grateful. Your circle will get smaller but it will feel more full. You’ll wonder where the time went, and you’ll cautiously consider how much of it you have left. You’ll think about all the things you’ve done and all of the things still left to do. It could be any day, it’s just a day after all. But on this day you’ll feel it all, reflect on what you’ve become, what you’re inevitably becoming. You’ll add a candle each year, your light growing a little brighter, a little bolder—because although you may mourn the loss of your youth, growing older isn’t a privilege everyone gets to experience.

Daragh Fleming is an author from Cork, Ireland. His debut in non-fiction, Lonely Boy, was published in 2022 by Bookhub Publishing. He has work appearing in several literary magazines including The Ogham Stone, Beir Bua, Trasna, The Madrigal, ROPES, Époque Magazine and more. Fleming won the Cork Arts ‘From The Well’ Short Story Competition in 2021. He was highly commended for both the Patrick Kavanagh Award and the Fool For Poetry Prize in 2023. Recently he was also shortlisted for the Alpine Fellowship Poetry Prize.