Catching up face-to-face

Friendships and their trajectories have been on my mind lately.  Reconnected recently with a school friend after years, and another one shared some old photos, and this poem came along.

Talking of friendships, some of the most supportive, most nourishing,  happen in the virtual world. Today I am over at the Cafe Writer Denise Covey's where we are talking poetry, and a shared love of books and coffee.  

I wish sometimes that you and I

lived in the same city, close by,

your garden steps just a short walk

from my porch end of the block,

maybe just a fence in between

or not even that, unbroken green

under our feet, lush, ankle-high.

Then I would stand at your back door

and knock in code, call you by your

old private names, known just to friends;

and we’d be out in a few seconds

our shoes  half laced, our hair undone

trailing free behind as we would run

back to the hilltop like before.

We’ve left those winding lanes for good,

those long lost alleyways of childhood -

the bike trails to the picnic spots,

the games of tag in vacant lots,

the building of castles in thin air,

the heat haze and the midday glare

that friendship easily withstood.

We speak quite often, you and I,

we laugh and talk, and we get by,

dredge out the memories and then check

who among us has a clearer deck;

we’ve cobbled back the friendships somehow

though we’re in different time-zones now,

continents connected through Wi-Fi.

But I still wish that I, one day,

might walk down that far alleyway

where you now live, and quietly knock;

you’d come to the door and we’d talk

face to face once more after years,

without wires and plastic barriers,

till there’s nothing else left to say.

Do you sometimes feel like that?  That you want to go back and walk those lanes that led you to your old friends?