The Friendship Song
Loretta Diane Walker
October 17, 2021
I am ten, you, eleven—neither understands forever,
or how we cook memories in summer’s oven-hot nights.
They are too short for us
to fill the air with our secret language,
eat Popsicles, and giggle
about what adolescent girls giggle about.
We are not concerned with becoming
more than what we are in this moment,
only with being together.
We sing make new friends but keep the old,
one is silver and the other gold.
Such emptiness in those words for us.
We want only the gold of our friendship,
lock our hearts with a pinkie swear—
“We will always be each other’s best friend.”
Aging is betrayal’s agent.
I am twelve, you, thirteen—neither understands vows
break because hearts expand beyond childish boundaries.
I am contradiction/cliché—band nerd, bookworm, track jock,
quiet.
You a middle school dream—social butterfly, cool kid,
pretty girl.
We are not concerned with becoming women,
only with being accepted.
We sing make new friends but keep the old,
one is silver and the other gold.
We share ourselves with other new gold friends.
Our friendship, silver. Our secret language, silent.
A rowdy wind yanks time, a flimsy kite, from our hands.
Years drift. Age thirty, my gold friend ascends. Pneumonia.
Her last words to me, “I love you.”
You see my broken heart, tell me “I’m sorry.”
Age sixty-five, your sister ascends. COVID.
I see your broken heart, tell you, “I’m sorry.”
Your words to me, “I know you are. I love you.”
Curious how loss, that container of sorrow,
holds the same words as restoration.
We sing make new friends but keep the old,
one is silver and the other gold.
But friendship is a wild animal
with flapping wide arms.
Love, the stronger beast,
circles its unassuming body,
waiting to tame it.
Loretta Diane Walker, an award-winning poet, multiple Pushcart Nominee, and Best of the Net Nominee, won the 2016 Phyllis Wheatley Book Award for poetry, for her collection, In This House (Bluelight Press). Loretta is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters. Her work has appeared in various literary journals, magazines, and anthologies throughout the United States, Canada, India, Ireland, and the UK. She has published five collections of poetry. Her manuscript Word Ghetto won the 2011 Bluelight Press Book Award. Loretta received a BME from Texas Tech University and earned a MA from The University of Texas of the Permian Basin. She teaches elementary music at Reagan Magnet School, Odessa, Texas.
