Friends

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._N._Taber

Today’s poem - another villanelle - was first written in 2002 and published in an anthology the following year before I included it in my collection.

Why do I make revisions at all?  During the process of preparing my collection for publication to Google Play in e-format, I find myself dissatisfied with some poems for reasons not always obvious, even to me; most, it has to do with how a poems ‘flows’ – or doesn’t, as the case may be.

Given that I’ve never really got along with most members of either my immediate or extended family, good friends have always been especially important to me. (Yes, even those of the ‘fair weather’ variety.) As I grow old (71 now and live alone) I am, oh, so thankful to and for good friends. and value our friendship even more.  

FRIENDS

Come some dark, lonely night

or saddest sunny day,

find friends, making it all right

At one with moon and starlight

kept at bay,

come some dark, lonely, night

Wherever a so-weepy half-light

gone charcoal grey,

find friends, making it all right

Find home fires burning bright

(shaping our clay)

come some dark, lonely night

Losing out (again) taking fright

of facing another day;

find friends, making it all right

Oh, but no kinder end or respite

from worldly rites of way;
come some darkest, longest night,

find friends, making it all right

Copyright R. N. Taber 2003; 2018

[Note: An earlier version of this poem first appeared under the title 'Among Friends, Music to the Ears' in an anthology, Where the Words take You, Anchor Books [Forward Press] 2003 and subsequently in The Third Eye (2004) by R. N. Taber, Assembly Books, 2004.]