Poems of Hope Contest: Lines on the Death of a Friend, Bethel McGrew

Bethel McGrew is a freelance writer based in Michigan. Her articles have appeared in various national and international outlets. Find her Substack at furtherup.net, and check out her poems for PFPOI's Halloween Sonnet and Couplets contests.

Lines On the Death of a Friend

You hailed the noonday midnight like a child,

As sun and earth hung split, unreconciled.

Moonshadow blanketed your sleepy street

Until the span of darkness was complete.

"You'd hate to be the Third Stage in a play,

Walk out to find the crowd has walked away."

 

That night, we wandered through a golden glow.

You brought a cane and took your journey slow.

I snapped you with my father, side by side.

I caught a Spring Snow shining like a bride.

Oh best of friends, gentlest of gentlemen!

You'd never see those trees in bloom again.

 

You faced your sure defeat with roguish grace

And little jokes about your yellowed face.

You didn't waste a second wondering "Why?"

There'd be a time to mourn, a time to cry.

You were yourself until the very last

Stroke of your life, when Death came hard and fast.

 

November found us coming back to grieve

The absence that we couldn't quite believe.

We reached the viewing more by faith than sight,

Through early snowfall, thick in ghostly light.

We browsed the choicest pictures they could find,

The table spread with what you left behind.

 

And is this all? These books, those mugs, that plaque?

The faded jersey that could take you back

To 1978? Tapes of your band?

These recollections of a foreign land,

Is this all that is left, all that is true?

These scattered odds and ends, these shards of you?

 

Surely we do not search the skies in vain

To see One coming on the clouds to reign,

Upon that day awaited for so long,

When stealing on the ear, the triumph song

Shall all the ransomed souls reanimate.

But until then, in hope we watch and wait.


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