Porch Friendship
I love you
sitting on your terrace of self-forgetfulness,
like a book I can’t put down.
A field of olive trees.
A letter read on a leaving train.
The tenderness of a mundane afternoon,
and the reckoning of a tempest.
I love you and that
night when we were
drinking crap wine on your balcony
stuffing bread in our mouths and talking of nothing.
I’ll never forget ugly dancing to the Beatles, or when I told you
it is a privilege to know you.
And it’s the truth that I would give up anything in this universe
for you to love yourself the way I love you,
because my greatest enemy is
your self-loathing
and I know that poetry would pump through your veins if you could see
the way your eyes light up at the simple mention of
Bulgaria.
Live wild and gently, please.
So that in the decades of our future,
when you’re gray-haired,
and your brown eyes reveal a lifetime of adventure,
I can visit your sequestered farm of sheep
and we will talk until the sun’s disk coincides with the wavering horizon.
Dance until the wine is gone, and the mountain is still.
I will tell you then, and I will tell you now,
it doesn’t matter to which cosmos our souls traveled.
Our entwined pasts would have forever whispered
from the narrow gorge of time,
“I’m here, waiting, always.”
Grace O’Hanlon born in Boston MA, is a rising senior at the Fashion Institute of Technology studying fashion business management with a minor in English (writing). Her work has been featured in W27 Newspaper, Blush Magazine, PrimmaDonna Zine, and Clutch Magazine. She is currently working on her first poetry collection titled, “Daughter of an Undertaker.”