Although female friendships are an important part of our lives, there are not as many poems about female friendship as one might expect. Poets seem to be more concerned with love relationships or their solitary pursuits. However, when they do examine the subject of friendship, they distill its essence. One of the most important qualities in a friendship is that it makes each of us into a better person. “A Poem of Friendship” by Nikki Giovanni and “Love” by Roy Croft explore this aspect of friendship. Other poems, like “My Friend’s Divorce” by Naomi Shihab Nye and “Secret Lives” by Barbara Ras, celebrate the love and support friends give each other during difficult times.
One of my daughters’ favorite poems is the dark and startling “A Poison Tree” by William Blake. Blake was ahead of his time in recognizing how important it is to discuss anger and disappointment with our friends, and the dangerous consequences of withholding our feelings.
Once our children have left home (although they say that never really happens), we look for others to care for. I know quite a few middle-aged women who have fallen in love with their pets—and I am one of them. That is why Elizabeth Barrett Browning, known better for her sonnet “How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count the Ways,” is represented here with a poem to her dog, Flush.
And when we run out of friends, there is always “Chocolate” by Rita Dove.
A Poem of Friendship
NIKKI GIOVANNI
We are not lovers
because of the love
we make
but the love
we have
We are not friends
because of the laughs
we spend
but the tears
we save
I don’t want to be near you
for the thoughts we share
but the words we never have
to speak
I will never miss you
because of what we do
but what we are
together
Letter to N.Y.
ELIZABETH BISHOP
For Louise Crane
In your next letter I wish you’d say
where you are going and what you are doing;
how are the plays, and after the plays
what other pleasures you’re pursuing:
taking cabs in the middle of the night,
driving as if to save your soul
where the road goes round and round the park
and the meter glares like a moral owl,
and the trees look so queer and green
standing alone in big black caves
and suddenly you’re in a different place
where everything seems to happen in waves,
and most of the jokes you just can’t catch,
like dirty words rubbed off a slate,
and the songs are loud but somehow dim
and it gets so terribly late,
and coming out of the brownstone house
to the gray sidewalk, the watered street,
one side of the buildings rises with the sun
like a glistening field of wheat.
—Wheat, not oats, dear. I’m afraid
if it’s wheat it’s none of your sowing,
nevertheless I’d like to know
what you are doing and where you are going.
On Gifts for Grace
BERNADETTE MAYER
I saw a great teapot
I wanted to get you this stupendous
100% cotton royal blue and black checked shirt,
There was a red and black striped one too
Then I saw these boots at a place called Chuckles
They laced up to about two inches above your ankles
All leather and in red, black or purple
It was hard to have no money today
I won’t even speak about the possible flowers and kinds of lingerie
All linen and silk with not-yet-perfumed laces
Brilliant enough for any of the Graces
Full of luxury, grace notes, prosperousness and charm
But I can only praise you with this poem—
Its being is the same as the meaning of your name
Love
ROY CROFT
I love you,
Not only for what you are,
But for what I am
When I am with you.
I love you,
Not only for what
You have made of yourself,
But for what
You are making of me.
I love you
For the part of me
That you bring out;
I love you
For putting your hand
Into my heaped-up heart
And passing over
All the foolish, weak things
That you can’t help
Dimly seeing there,
And for drawing out
Into the light
All the beautiful belongings
That no one else had looked
Quite far enough to find.
I love you because you
Are helping me to make
Of the lumber of my life
Not a tavern
But a temple;
Out of the works
Of my every day
Not a reproach
But a song.
I love you
Because you have done
More than any creed
Could have done
To make me good,
And more than any fate
Could have done
To make me happy.
You have done it
Without a touch,
Without a word,
Without a sign.
You have done it
By being yourself.
Perhaps that is what
Being a friend means,
After all.
To Hayley
WILLIAM BLAKE
Thy friendship oft has made my heart to ache:
Do be my enemy—for friendship’s sake.
A Poison Tree
WILLIAM BLAKE
I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
And I water’d it in fears,
Night and morning with my tears;
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles.
And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright;
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine,
And into my garden stole
When the night had veil’d the pole:
In the morning glad I see
My foe outstretch’d beneath the tree.
August
LOUISE GLÜCK
My sister painted her nails fuchsia,
a color named after a fruit.
All the colors were named after foods:
coffee frost, tangerine sherbet.
We sat in the backyard, waiting for our lives to resume
the ascent summer interrupted:
triumphs, victories, for which school
was a kind of practice.
The teachers smiled down at us, pinning on the blue ribbons.
And in our heads, we smiled down at the teachers.
Our lives were stored in our heads.
They hadn’t begun; we were both sure
we’d know when they did.
They certainly weren’t this.
We sat in the backyard, watching our bodies change:
first bright pink, then tan.
I dribbled baby oil on my legs; my sister
rubbed polish remover on her left hand,
tried another color.
We read, we listened to the portable radio.
Obviously this wasn’t life, this sitting around
in colored law
n chairs.
Nothing matched up to the dreams.
My sister kept trying to find a color she liked:
it was summer, they were all frosted.
Fuchsia, orange, mother-of-pearl.
She held her left hand in front of her eyes,
moved it from side to side.
Why was it always like this—
the colors so intense in the glass bottles,
so distinct, and on the hand
almost exactly alike,
a film of weak silver.
My sister shook the bottle. The orange
kept sinking to the bottom; maybe
that was the problem.
She shook it over and over, held it up to the light,
studied the words in the magazine.
The world was a detail, a small thing not yet
exactly right. Or like an afterthought, somehow
still crude or approximate.
What was real was the idea:
My sister added a coat, held her thumb
to the side of the bottle.
We kept thinking we would see
the gap narrow, though in fact it persisted.
The more stubbornly it persisted,
the more fiercely we believed.
Summer at the Beach
LOUISE GLÜCK
Before we started camp, we went to the beach.
Long days, before the sun was dangerous.
My sister lay on her stomach, reading mysteries.
I sat in the sand, watching the water.
You could use the sand to cover
parts of your body that you didn’t like.
I covered my feet, to make my legs longer;
the sand climbed over my ankles.
I looked down at my body, away from the water.
I was what the magazines told me to be:
coltish. I was a frozen colt.
My sister didn’t bother with these adjustments.
When I told her to cover her feet, she tried a few times,
but she got bored; she didn’t have enough willpower
to sustain a deception.
I watched the sea; I listened to the other families.
Babies everywhere: what went on in their heads?
I couldn’t imagine myself as a baby;
I couldn’t picture myself not thinking.
I couldn’t imagine myself as an adult either.
They all had terrible bodies: lax, oily, completely
committed to being male and female.
The days were all the same.
When it rained, we stayed home.
When the sun shone, we went to the beach with my mother.
My sister lay on her stomach, reading her mysteries.
I sat with my legs arranged to resemble
what I saw in my head, what I believed was my true self.
Because it was true: when I didn’t move I was perfect.
Girlfriends
ELLEN DORÉ WATSON
First and last, mirrors
whose secrets we keep in a home-made petrie dish
(sometimes they give us ideas)
I mean the ones who say the unwelcome when it matters
whose kids watch us for clues
whose kids we watch for clues
Not the ones who decided there was too much too true
of them in our eyes, and ran,
but the ones who’ll be around to see us bald or one-breasted
and we them
who’ll know to say what can’t be said (with their skin)
whose bodies, spreading or starved, we love
whose husbands (or lack of) it’s okay to disapprove, or almost covet
whose girlfriends are ours by proxy
who share these assumptions and would their last
Godiva, valium, amulet
The lifers
who, even seven states away, are the porches
where we land
My Friend’s Divorce
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE
I want her
To dig up
every plant
in her garden,
the pansies, the penta,
roses, rununculas,
thyme and the lilies,
the thing
nobody knows the name of,
unwind the morning glories
from the wire windows
of the fence,
take the blooming
and the almost-blooming
and the dormant,
especially the dormant,
and then
and then
plant them in her new yard
on the other side
of town
and see how
they breathe!
Chocolate
RITA DOVE
Velvet fruit, exquisite square
I hold up to sniff
between finger and thumb—
how you numb me
If I don’t eat you quickly,
you’ll melt in my palm.
Pleasure seeker, if I let you
you’d liquefy everywhere.
Knotted smoke, dark punch
of earth and night and leaf,
for a taste of you
any woman would gladly
crumble to ruin.
Enough chatter: I am ready
to fall in love!
Magnificat
MICHÈLE ROBERTS
For Sian, after thirteen years
oh this man
what a meal he made of me
how he chewed and gobbled and sucked
in the end he spat me all out
you arrived on the dot, in the nick
of time, with your red curls flying
I was about to slip down the sink like grease
I nearly collapsed, I almost
wiped myself out like a stain
I called for you, and you came, you voyaged
fierce as a small archangel with swords and breasts
you declared the birth of a new life
in my kitchen there was an annunciation
and I was still, awed by your hair’s glory
you commanded me to sing of my redemption
oh my friend, how
you were mother for me, and how
I could let myself lean on you
comfortable as an old cloth, familiar as enamel saucepans
I was a child again, pyjamaed
in winceyette, my hair plaited, and you
listened, you soothed me like cakes and milk
you listened to me for three days, and I poured
it out, I flowed all over you
like wine, like oil, you touched the place where it hurt
at night we slept together in my big bed
your shoulder eased me towards dreams
when we met, I tell you
it was a birthday party, a funeral
it was a holy communion
between women, a Visitation
it was two old she-goats butting
and nuzzling each other in the smelly fold
Secret Lives
BARBARA RAS
The same moms that smear peanut butter on bread, sometimes tearing
the white center and patching it with a little spit,
the same moms who hold hair back from faces throwing up into bowls
and later sit with their kids at bedtime, never long enough at first,
and then inevitably overtime, grabbing on to a hand
as if they could win out against the pull on the other side,
the world’s spin and winds and tides,
all of it in cahoots with sex to pull the kid into another orbit,
these moms will go out, maybe in pairs, sometimes in groups,
and leave their kids with dads and fast food, something greasy
they eat with their fingers, later miniature golf, may
be a movie,
a walk with the dog in the dog park,
where one night a kid sees an old mutt riding in a stroller,
invalid, on its back, its paws up, cute like that, half begging, half swoon,
and this kid, who once told her mom she knew what dads did on poker nights—
“They’re guys, they’ll just deal the cards and quarrel”—
starts to wonder what moms do out together, whether they talk about their kids,
their little rosebuds, their little night-lights,
or are they talking about their bodies and what they did with them
in Portugal, Hawaii, the coast of France, it’s better than cards,
it’s anatomy and geography, they’re all over the map,
or maybe not talking but dancing—
to oldies? light rock? merengue? Would they dare dance
with men, with men in vests? in earmuffs? forget earmuffs!
top hats, younger men in sneakers who catch their eye from across the room.
Now they’re singing. Where have they kept the words to so many songs,
storing them up like secrets, hidden candy, the words melting in their mouths,
chocolate, caramels, taffy,
the next thing you know they’ll be drinking—or are they already
on to a third bottle, some unaffordable Nebbiolo
from the Piedmont, red wine named after the region’s fog
and aging into a hint of truffles.
Soon two of them will walk off together, laughing,
their mouths open too wide, their shoulders, no their whole bodies
shaking, the way a bear would laugh after it ate you,
heartily, remorselessly, they laugh all the way to the bathroom,
where together in the mirrors they try to keep a straight face
so they can put on lipstick the crimson of the sun sinking into the bay.
They blot their red mouths on tissues they toss
over their shoulders, leaving the impressions of their lips behind