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I subscribe to Choice Literacy’s Big Fresh newsletter. This month Brenda Power writes about ambition versus aspiration. She also opens with a Mary Oliver quote, “Joy is not made to be a crumb.”
Tricia Stohr-Hunt’s prompt on Laura Shovan’s February Poetry Project was a variety of birthday cakes. (This year we are writing about food.) I thought of a Facebook post I had seen of a baby eating his first birthday cake. This is apparently a thing, first birthday cake smash.
Smashing all of those things together made a poem that I am pleased with, if only for the pleasure it evokes.
Joy is not a crumb;
it is the whole cake
eaten by a child
on his first birthday
digging with his cake-filled hand
bite by bite, grip by grip
until the cake and icing cover
every part of his head
seeping up into his nostrils.
That kind of joy is your Aspiration
Go for it!
(c) Margaret Simon, 2019
Photo by Susan Michelle Brisson.
Reflections on the Teche 