To Friendship: Part 1

It's time for poems to, for, and about my friends. Some are about specific people. Some are about groups or imagined friends, but I need to share these thoughts and feelings, and hope others can enjoy them, too. So to begin, from Dinah Maria Mulock Craik (via The Best Loved Poems of the American People), I give you

Friendship
Oh, the comfort--the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person,
Having neither to weigh thoughts,
Nor measure words--but pouring them
All right out--just as they are--
Chaff and grain together--
Certain that a faithful hand will
Take and sift them--
Keep what is worth keeping--
And with the breath of kindness
Blow the rest away.


And from my life shortly after returning from two years of life in Italy, these thoughts about friendship and memory:

No One Will Ever Know
1998

I lost my mind.
Or more truly, the world did.
How I loved, how I hoped,
How I prayed, how I groped for truth
in a foreign world.
How I lived the strangeness of every day.
How the clock ticked,
My heart beat,
My friends breathed,
And the city moved around us.
How in a place most will never hear of,
I did a work most will never know.
How I loved people
that will never make the news.
How our names will only be remembered
to our children,
But we don’t care because,
For one moment,
We knew we had a friend,
And knew that life was good
and God was love.
But no one will ever know
Because the world has lost our minds
That died with us,
Still inside our heads.