• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Than never to have loved at all.

Reconciliation

WALT WHITMAN

Word over all, beautiful as the sky,

Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost,

That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly

softly wash again, and ever again, this soil’d world;

For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead,

I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin—I

draw near,

Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.

FRIENDSHIP

WHEN I WAS GROWING UP, all I wanted to do was be with my friends, be like my friends, and dress the same way as my friends did. We all had the same hairstyle and hair color, and mostly we still do. Growing up in a large extended family also gave me a built-in set of people who still know almost everything about me, and taught me how to be a good friend. If we are lucky, we have close friends who have been part of our lives since childhood or college, and others we have connected with through work or through our children. We share relationship dramas, issues at work, health and mothering questions. Now that my children are mostly grown, friends are the ones I turn to for laughter and comfort. One of my favorite lines is in the poem “Girlfriends” by Ellen Doré Watson, who writes of long-term friendships, “The lifers/who, even seven states away, are the porches/where we land.”

Although female friendships are an important part of our lives, there are not as many poems about female friendship as one might expect. Poets seem to be more concerned with love relationships or their solitary pursuits. However, when they do examine the subject of friendship, they distill its essence. One of the most important qualities in a friendship is that it makes each of us into a better person. “A Poem of Friendship” by Nikki Giovanni and “Love” by Roy Croft explore this aspect of friendship. Other poems, like “My Friend’s Divorce” by Naomi Shihab Nye and “Secret Lives” by Barbara Ras, celebrate the love and support friends give each other during difficult times.

One of my daughters’ favorite poems is the dark and startling “A Poison Tree” by William Blake. Blake was ahead of his time in recognizing how important it is to discuss anger and disappointment with our friends, and the dangerous consequences of withholding our feelings.

Once our children have left home (although they say that never really happens), we look for others to care for. I know quite a few middle-aged women who have fallen in love with their pets—and I am one of them. That is why Elizabeth Barrett Browning, known better for her sonnet “How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count the Ways,” is represented here with a poem to her dog, Flush.

And when we run out of friends, there is always “Chocolate” by Rita Dove.

A Poem of Friendship

NIKKI GIOVANNI

We are not lovers

because of the love

we make

but the love

we have

We are not friends

because of the laughs

we spend

but the tears

we save

I don’t want to be near you

for the thoughts we share

but the words we never have

to speak

I will never miss you

because of what we do

but what we are

together

Letter to N.Y.

ELIZABETH BISHOP

For Louise Crane

In your next letter I wish you’d say

where you are going and what you are doing;

how are the plays, and after the plays

what other pleasures you’re pursuing:

taking cabs in the middle of the night,

driving as if to save your soul

where the road goes round and round the park

and the meter glares like a moral owl,

and the trees look so queer and green

standing alone in big black caves

and suddenly you’re in a different place

where everything seems to happen in waves,

and most of the jokes you just can’t catch,

like dirty words rubbed off a slate,

and the songs are loud but somehow dim

and it gets so terribly late,

and coming out of the brownstone house

to the gray sidewalk, the watered street,

one side of the buildings rises with the sun

like a glistening field of wheat.

—Wheat, not oats, dear. I’m afraid

if it’s