Gerry Gilbert's poem opens with a little joke about time: "The way with June is this: / it ends". The month is barely introduced before it is running out. The speaker slips in "(and first it's my sister's birthday)" as a parenthesis, then says again, flatly, "then it ends." The birthday sits inside a closing month, and the poem is about how to notice a day before it is gone.
The method is simple. "Today in the smell of / elderberry blossoms / today in the colour of / rice crispies on a steel spoon of milk." Each repeated "today" opens a door onto one sense: smell, then colour, then touch. The images are deliberately ordinary. Rice crispies in milk on a steel spoon is not a poetic subject, yet the pale cereal against cold metal is seen with real exactness. Nothing here is grand. The poem suggests that attention is what makes a day worth singing about.
Then the texture changes. The third "today" lands on "the hand of / putty & windowglass," and the writing begins to fumble the way the hands do: "getting confused/fingers/putty oil/ not really finding/ a way/looks bad/keeps falling out." Slashes replace ordinary punctuation, so the phrases stumble into one another. "Frush/fruss" is not quite a word but a half-muttered noise of frustration, and the list of feelings ends bluntly with "infinite heartless / boredom/shit/frustration." The poem then states what it takes to be the root of the trouble: "of desire to know/therefore control." Anyone who has tried to fix something and made it worse will recognise this. Wanting to master a thing is exactly what makes it slip. Judging by the imagery, putty and windowglass stand for the whole urge to fix and manage the world.
The turn comes with "Or Awhile / Swing." The capital letters make it sound like a half-spoken instruction to stop and let go for a bit, and "Swing" suggests the loose, rhythmic motion of a child's swing. It also lets the poem rhyme faintly with the word "sing" a few lines later. Only after this release does the birthday get its plain announcement: "Today is Linda's Birthday." The poem never says Linda is the sister, but the placement strongly suggests it.
What follows is a run of imperatives, almost a little recipe for recovery: "turn to the word for it / return to bed / return to dinner / tune to breath / breathe." The sounds do the work. "Turn," "return" and "tune" share a texture, so the lines seem to circle back on themselves, and "tune to breath" borrows the language of a radio dial. The speaker moves from struggling with the world to adjusting himself to it. The last "breathe" stands alone as a single word, which makes the reader take a breath too.
The ending is quietly funny and quietly moving: "I wore a gingham/shirt / without sweater / it shone." After all the frustration, the reward is a shirt, and it is enough. The line break leaves "Today" hanging between two sentences: "Make a note for anytime to sing of / Today" and "Today / I wore a gingham/shirt." It can be read as both, so the day is the thing to be sung about and also the day on which the shirt was worn. The poem closes on "25th of June / Birthday", which reads like the date and label on a card. With only a few days of June left, the date feels both specific and fleeting.
The title matters too. Calling the poem "From an Undelivered Birthday Card" makes us overhear something private, a message that, by its own account, never reached its recipient. That explains why the voice is so loose and unguarded, and why it wanders from birthday to putty to breathing instead of offering polished greetings. The poem has no rhyme scheme and no regular metre. Its rhythm comes from line breaks, repetition and the speaker's changing pace.
Its significance lies in this modesty. The poem does not say that happiness requires great events. It claims that a day can be saved from ending by noticing it: elderberry, cereal, a clumsy repair, a clean shirt. Even a failed card can still be a song.