Happy Birthday Kate!

My girl is 24 today.

Yesterday she was 7

Last week she was brand new.

8 pounds, 13 ounces,

round and red

with a perfect 

rosebud mouth.

What happened

to all those years?

My best advice -

don’t blink!

Don’t even blink…

My amazing daughter Kathryn is 24 today.  The poem really says it all!  I have no idea where all those years went, but I am so proud of the young woman she has become.  PAD and NaPoWriMo day 14.

You Never Know

Despise not small things, either for evil or good, for a look may work thy ruin, or a word create thy wealth. - A spark is a little thing, yet it may kindle the world.  – Martin Farquhar Tupper

when Kate comes home

she falls asleep on the couch

every night

with the TV on.

In the morning,

I turn off the set, pick up her

plate, Kleenex, water;

Otis wakes her up.

Fifteen pounds of

of super-charged, tail wagging,

face licking, fur

planted on her chest

is surprisingly a way

she (mostly) likes to wake up.

I bring her coffee and tell her

“budge up, ya great lump”

and we giggle, because

we read all the Harry Potter’s together,

loved them.

Then we talk.

Last year, for a little while,

I got it in my head that

I resented picking up

bringing coffee,

every morning,

Then one day, from the next, room

I overheard her tell her friend,

“I love going home –

my mom brings me coffee,

every morning

it’s great.

You just never know

what will make a memory.

PAD, NaPoWriMo Day 12

Daughter Ache - Magpie Tales #48

Daughter Ache

I Watch
As my daughter of seventeen
Preens in front of the bathroom mirror
Perfumes and lip glosses
Scattered across the counter
Contact lenses spooning
On her azure eyes
She is an opening flower
Still dewy with the new day of her life

She prepares herself like a sacrifice
Lacquering her lashes
Fitting silver droplets to her ears
Pale curls frustrate her most valiant
Efforts at containment
And erupt over her shoulders
She concentrates, lower lip thrust out
And the ghost of her three-year-old self
Escapes from my heart

And how can I let her go out
Into a hard, jagged world
Already riddled with casualties
When she is as vulnerable as a reed?
Yet, I cannot take this opening bud
And press it under glass
Or stick it in a dried arrangement
On my coffee table
Preserved and safe
And dead

I wrote this for and about my daughter Kate when she graduated from high school. She is an accomplished pianiast, so this week's Magpie prompt made me think of her.