Here’s a cake for you with candles
you can even blow them out!
There’s no sticky frosting mess here,
there’s no fancy birthday wrap.
It’s a cake I made for you, dear,
with the Birthday Cake Bake app.
Copyright © 2005 April Halprin Wayland. From the book The Poetry Friday Anthology: Poems for the School Year with Connections to the Common Core. Pomelo Books. Reprinted by permission of the author.
I wrote this poem in response to a request by Janet Wong and Sylvia Vardell for a poem about technology. I thought about all the gadgets we have today; I wanted to write a short, light poem that might make you laugh.
April’s books include Scholastic’s Best Seller, To Rabbittown, a free-verse picture book, Knopf’s it’s Not My Turn to Look For Grandma! (recommended on PBS’s “Storytime”), the Sydney Taylor Gold Award-winner New Year at the Pier, and the multi-award-winning Girl Coming In For A Landing—an illustrated novel in poems for teens (Knopf). Her CD/MP3 of stories and poems won the National Parenting Publications Gold Medal for storytelling; her poetry appears in numerous anthologies, and she’s a seven-time recipient of SCBWI’S Magazine Merit Award for Poetry. April has taught in over 400 schools across America, in England, Italy, Germany, France and Poland. She blogs with five other children’s authors who also teach writing on TeachingAuthors.com is a founding member The Children’s Authors Network and has been an instructor with the Writers’ Program of UCLA Extension for over a decade. Her website? www.AprilWayland.com where you’ll discover she’s ½ author, ½ poet, ½ not good at fractions.