Today is the birthday of my friend Kathleen Kummer. After several falls, she is now very frail and housebound.

Kathleen and I met on a writing week with the poet Lawrence Sail at the beginning of the century. She had lived and worked in the Netherlands. We became friends. I visited her in Dorchester and in Devon where she moved, aged 79, to be nearer her two daughters.

Kathleen had a body of work when she moved to Devon, and sent a manuscript to Alwyn Marriage at Oversteps Books. They published her debut collection Living below sea level (2012).

I am deeply grateful to Kathleen for our friendship and our poetry connection. Today I’m posting her poem Birthday Party, showing her empathy and eye for telling detail.

Birthday Party

It’s his fortieth birthday. He’s sitting alone. He seems
neither man, not child, nor anything in between.
When he opens his presents, he’s all of these at once,
and happy. (‘What shall I give him?’ ‘Anything’, they’d said.)

Somehow, he’d made it plain he wanted a fish
on his cake. So on top, a flatfish. It looks like a fossil,
all its bones impressed on the green marzipan. A frieze
of stiff, blue icing ripples round the base.

A family group over there on the leather settee
talks about children at college and moving house.
He gazes through and beyond them, remote as those heads
on Easter Island, but jumps up to blow out his candles.

He’s given a card which reads Happy 30th! (‘He won’t know,
don’t worry.’) His hair is receding – he’s beginning to look like
his father, who tomorrow will take him back to the Home
where he has his bedroom and bathroom en suite. (‘Very smart!’).