Friends

by Robert Sund

Friends make us fuller.

When friends leave, their light stays behind.

It is like the blue sea

that supports the white breakers

that come and go.

No matter how far I go,

I long to return and be with friends.

It is never the same fire I left,

but beneath it are the ashes

of all our meetings that have gone before.

From Poems from Ish River Country, Washington, D.C.: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2004, page 134. The photo shows Shi Shi Beach on the coast of Washington state, the location that inspired this poem.

Robert Sund’s poem, “Mid-September at the Boomshack in Town,” ends with the following stanza (in the same book as the previous poem, page 236):

At the end of my life,

I will lie down in

a little boat,

and float out on

the sea of

                these friendships.