To a Dear Friend

A friendship that, in 1993, began thirty-five years earlier and which was to continue, in 1993, for almost another thirty years.

June 27, 1993

Dear friend – words we use

the way we say good morning, or how are you.

But words that with you take on their truest meaning.

How many are the friends we meet, or find, or make

in the forty-fifty-sixty years at our disposal?

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Friends who are there in times of need,

to comfort us in times of sorrow,

to rejoice for us with all their heart,

who feel with us – for whom we feel.

Where the understanding of two souls

is about as close as human nature will permit,

for are we not all captives of our senses,

of our attempts to transmit meanings, feelings,

through the use of words

which by their very nature,

inevitably enmeshed in past and present,

generic yet also ours alone,

with innuendos, implications, allusions,

which make what surfaces in discourse

no more than an echo of the content.

A gesture or a look may then say more than words,

for we can guess, presume, gather,

add on the nuances the word itself may half infer.

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A friend is someone in whom we see ourselves

as we might have liked to be,

hold dear for what we have in common.

Sorrow with, rejoice with.

As we grow older, you and I,

the sorrows, time itself, begin to take there toll.

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To every thing there is a season,

and a time to every purpose under the heaven.

A time to be born, and a time to die…

A time to weep, and a time to laugh…

A time to love…

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The housing of our souls grows worn with time

but we are what we feel inside.

The gaze the looking glass sends back to me

is clear, is somehow timeless.

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And only when I see myself reflected in my friend,

in you, my dearest friend,

and note, as you show me your roses,

how time has left its mark,

how, head still proud, your shoulders bow,

how embitterment lies only half concealed

behind your radiant smile,

the passing of the years becomes reality.

I know that my face too is lined and drawn.

The pattern of our lives is now but to be fulfilled

and with this sudden insight

my aching heart goes out to you

and makes me love you all the more.

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A fleeting instant of awareness,

we take up life as just before,

and the shell our soul inhabits

reveals itself for what it is,

nor more than an inconsequential

transient container.

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