One’s eighth decade is a time of diminishing returns, by which I mean fewer and fewer longstanding friendships are returning one’s emails, zooms or whatever. Sad but inevitable. In my three books of collected poems whose covers you can find in earlier posts, I found myself meditating on why we are succoured by close relationships and how they become motivating features in later life. Writing elegies for those who have adventured into the last great challenge, also has a fulfilling impact on the writer. As a poet perhaps you have a responsibility to lay down a memory-jewel for departed friends, those who gave you so much when they were alive.

All of which leads to the following poem:


Amity

A long-lived friendship is not a given
It is subliminally
Sought

It is unlike
The natural bonds of kin
But a ladder whose struts are
Two lives held
In parallel
By the alchemical rungs
Of fellow feeling

Smoothing
The jagged edges of
Individual isolation

(From Above and Beyond 2026)