(Photo by: Ben White)
April is National Poetry Month and this one I’d written several months, maybe over a year or so ago. And I wrote it when I got to missing someone in my life who’s – a friend, brother, drinking buddy, just….
I suffer from what Cordelia suffered from in King Lear when she tried to describe her love for her father when she said, “I cannot heave my heart into my mouth.”
I empathize because even though I am a writer – nothing in the English language encompasses that familial blood/not blood connection we find with certain people. But anyway – enough about that. Here’s my poem:
Old Friend
I miss you
Old friend
Heart of my heart
Fondest memories when
Mornings lasted until sundown
The air a Sweet summertime song
Our wisdom was shared between glasses of Amber coloured discontent
Bitter enough on the tongue
To coax a sweet melody
Well into an evening
I miss the old when
Ghosts sailing on the breeze
Thick with heavy songs and worry and humidity
When the mood struck our fancy
We’d sing down stars from the heavens
Or leaves from the trees
We were brilliant then, not so much now
Now, were grown up
But the faint notes I hear
Tinkling beyond the sunset
The ghost still ramble and the whisky’s still warm
Although time and distance and days and doings rob us
And give us grey in our hair, in our beards, in our eyes
They can’t steal the youthful sound of our voices
Old friend
Closer than my shadow
Thicker blood hasn’t run between two souls
Or maybe that was the liquor, or our Irish dispositions?
Or sappy drunkenness? Ha!
Who cares
We were young,
Old friend
And right there in those moments
We always will be.
(Love ya, pal. It’ll be alright, I promise)