Last year the poetry editor of a small New York-based magazine asked if I was interested in writing a poem on friendship, to which I joyously responded yesyesyes. It was summer and I had just returned from a late evening walk by the river, my heart still full from the glow of the fireflies that lit up the woods along its edge. For some of us, poetry is a dark, dark secret, its stain spilling but held inside random pages in old notebooks, too much of a guilty pleasure to be shared with strangers. There are better poets, I thought, who publish on love and war and rising prices and everything in between. But this time it was about friendship. This time the stakes were high.
A class discussion I have with my students early in the university semester is on friendship, via a scholarly article written by Elizabeth Spelman and Maria Lugones titled 바카라Have We Got a Theory for You.바카라 The article is about the impossibility of speaking in a unified voice even as women when we have such diverse histories and different experiences, but it is most eloquently about friendship. Friends do not try to extract information to control or exploit, we are reminded by the authors, nor do friendships grow in the soil of guilt. So instead of trying to craft more nuanced theories on allyship, just do what you바카라d do for a friend, is the authors바카라 deceptively simple (epistemo) logical solution to communicating across differences. Yet - what do we do for a friend? We are intrigued by stories of friendship between literary and intellectual greats: Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore, Tagore and Yeats, Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey, Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston바카라the list is long. Even Sanskrit epics like the Mahabharata speak of beautiful friendships, such as between Draupadi and her sakha Krishna. Yet our cultures still place an inordinate emphasis on romantic love, with a zillion books, podcasts, and relationship coaching on how to be a better partner. Where do we learn how to be a friend?
Recently a student made an insightful comment in class; she pointed out how in the romance genre, the character of the 바카라best friend바카라 provides a safe, uncomplicated backdrop to the frisky couple whose amorous adventures take centre stage. It made me think how this safety is also a bulwark against more 바카라threatening바카라 emotions such as romantic attraction 바카라 the friendship between two heterosexual individuals, for instance, or a straight woman and a gay man. Indeed many poets, let down by the unreliability of exciting lovers, have penned how they were redeemed by dependable friendships. Emily Bronte바카라s famous poem 바카라Love and Friendship바카라 conveys this sentiment well: 바카라Love is like the wild rose-briar / Friendship like the holly-tree / The holly is dark when the rose-briar blooms / But which will bloom most constantly?바카라
Perhaps the best life partners are not just good lovers but better friends, to go soul-wards rather than only skin-deep. Some lines on the love that still haunt me since I first came upon them years ago are by Yeats: 바카라How many loved your moments of glad grace / and loved your beauty, with love false or true / but one man loved the pilgrim soul in you / and loved the sorrows of your changing face.바카라 But what when the dividing line is blurrier in a different way? Friends turned lovers, lovers turned friends, friends, who바카라d rather be lovers, lovers who바카라d rather be friends? In 바카라Amorous Friendship', Belle Randall writes of 바카라a returned but unrequited love affair, yearning for spring with winter in the air / Call it friendship and forget the amore바카라hurt in the heart / perceiving something as ended, where friends have no fear in being apart.바카라 Ella Wheeler Wilcox says it with a deeper sigh in 바카라Friendship After Love.바카라 바카라So after Love has led us till he tires /of his own throes, and torments, and desires / Comes large-eyed friendship, with a restful gaze바카라We do not wish the pain back, or the heat / And yet, and yet, these days are incomplete.바카라
Letting go is easier, sometimes. For Mary Oliver, 바카라to live in this world, you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal/ to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it /and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.바카라 Travelers, especially 바카라 not seasonal tourists but seasoned travelers 바카라 must master the art of letting go. Elizabeth Bishop바카라s long-loved poem 바카라One Art바카라 could just as well be a traveler바카라s anthem. 바카라The art of losing isn바카라t hard to master / so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost / that their loss is no disaster / I lost two cities, lovely ones / And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent / I miss them, but it wasn바카라t a disaster.바카라 From New Delhi to New York and many more stops between, I too have learned to live with the (non)disaster of loss, of people and places who no longer are. Yet if my heart calls someone a friend, I do try to hold on. While attachment to the undeserving is not without its own perils, I have mostly been fortunate when it comes to some serendipitous friendships.
It was on account of this good fortune, for which one is grateful to the universe, and for so much else that can be said about it, that I promised the editor I would write a long poem on friendship. Yesyesyes. He said it could rhyme (I cannot be sure if it was encouragement or resignation), without bringing up such ponderous subjects as the iambic pentameter. It wasn바카라t an urgent political event that needed immediate media commentary, so I held on to my resolve and waited. The time seemed right after a few months. I scribbled six lines and sent it to the editor to gauge his initial reaction, only to be crisply informed that Friendship Day had long passed and would I please resend it next July for the magazine바카라s special edition that year.
So the poem is still incomplete, though I did add some lines later. It is only February; there may be time yet to complete it by July. Meanwhile, if you miss talking to a friend on a non-friendship day during non-July 바카라 write again, for no reason at all 바카라 here is my unfinished poem.
Sadly, I am not a poet. I write prose
Which has its own pitfalls, I suppose
But one thing prose does not do
Is demand a silly rhyme from you.
Yet I would do it for a friend
To hold on to what must not end
So this non-poem on friendship I share
(The literary establishment does not care.)
Whatever the quality of my art,
I hope it finds its way to a friendly heart.
