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# Wax
- URL: https://dianaludwick.com/wax/
- Published: 2026-10-13T15:20:06.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-24T20:04:31.000Z
- Description: “Wax,” on adding another candle to the birthday cake and watching the passage of time take its toll on those around the table, written Tuesday, October 13, 2026 poem 286 in a series of 365 poems written by Diana Ludwick in 2026. Photo: "Four Candles," by Diana Ludwick © 2026.
- Author: Diana Ludwick
- Tags: 2026 Poetry Challenge, Culinary, Eating and Drinking, Ethnographical, Generational, Geriatric Millennial, Maryland, Material Culture, Nostalgia, Of Cooking, Of Place, Poems, Recipes for Life, Reminiscing, Aging, Autumn, Beeswax, Birthday, Candles, Celebrations, Daughters, Elders, Flame, Generations, In-Laws, Milestones, October, Parents, Passing of Time, Pillars, Siblings, Teenagers, Wax, #Migrated-1792872215677, #wp, #wp-post, #Import 2026-10-24 20:03

No longer a candidate   
for safely depicting my coming age   
with an expanse of pink spiral pawns  
I stare now at strange partners:   
a shaped tens-place number  
staked next to three solo pillars;  
four wax figures melting   
under the heat of their lit wicks.  
  
An iPhone lights up,   
camera’s rolling.  
People watch me;   
mind empties.  
  
I concatenate   
 a few wisps   
 of half thoughts  
— dredged   
from my near-constant   
Perimenopausal haze —   
into an incomplete theorem,  
the proxy of a birthday wish.  
  
Even held within   
the rusty vault of my cranium,   
my cheeks flush with self-chiding;  
I’d failed at wishing “correctly.”  
  
Blow candles out;   
I can do that.  
  
Pass the cake stand   
heavy with the amalgamation of   
chocolate bars and imported butter,  
Flours and the essence of orchids,   
over to the guest offering   
to cut and pass slices.  
  
Around the table, I take in:  
Our parents, aging in real time  
Our child, fickle and fabulous both  
My sibling, deflated and brave,   
who bears witness of my birthday  
of my whirling husband   
whose hands are always full   
of dishes or oven mitts   
or passing glasses full of cheer  
while she sits somber, her body here,  
her mind far away; fresh heartbreak.  
  
Life is precarious  
and awkward  
and excruciating  
and   
so,   
so   
swift.  
  
Blink and Dad’s on a walker,  
A frail giant, breakable, tender.  
Mom’s famous raven curls   
now a head of steel coils,   
the silver and charcoal of an elder.  
  
My in-laws trade with my parents  
surgery and medical protocol stories   
complaints and medication cocktail ideas  
they animate as they share  
their own unfolding encounters   
with doctors and body fluids.  
  
I take in our child,   
every bit of thirteen and a half,   
and all the hormones and huffery  
that comes standard with that age.  
  
And my husband,   
at last seated,   
eyes heavy with the fatigue   
of an endless day of preparations.  
For me.  
  
No snapshot can contain us  
  
Time marches on,   
I grasp the moment as I can,   
with the same success   
of a toddler   
chasing a robin in the yard.