A Birthday Poem For a Friend...As Time Streams By

Happy Birthday, Sasha 

Didn't you just have one?! haha😁 

A year sure isn't very long anymore, is it?!

Hope you are having a super-special day!

Sometimes this is the day I dig out dahlia bulbs but not this year!

I just can't bear to tear their blooms away yet!

It seems that Time streams by in its sequence of dawn-to-dawn

And all too soon, noon-after-noon another year is gone

Easier to tame oceans as they rush across the shore

Than to hold back one moment that sparkles and is no more

We used to collect rocks and stamps and butterflies and such

Today’s collections consist of treasures we cannot touch

Where, tendered to a vault that brims with sentimental gleam

We gaze upon spent days like youth gazes toward the dream

…and we will never find the words to make them understand

How future runs through us like an hourglass full of sand

Or how the calendar never misses a single day

Yet seems somehow as if it skips a few along the way  

And so we learn, because we cannot turn back time, to love

And live as if today is all that life will be made of

Because it seems, as time streams by, the older that we get

We feel some days as if we have not even started yet

And so we vow to find the happiness we else might miss

If we are deaf and blind to This Very Moment That Is

Because it seems, as Time streams by in its numeric sums

The older that we get, ah, the more precious it becomes

The music bitter-sweeter than it was when we were young

The hour fonder-fleeter with each season, here then gone

And oh, it seems as time streams by oft from its weathered banks

All we can say is ‘my, oh, my’ and humbly give God thanks

© Janet Martin