Poems about Friendship

The most viewed page on my website (this website, hello!) is a blog about the best poetry about a broken heart. This makes me a little sad — so many shattered hearts out there! — but also underlined something I bang on about almost incessantly: the fact that poetry is useful, and nourishing, and for everyone. Poetry is good for you! Someone has felt this way before, and they wrote all about it so I could feel less lonely, which was good of them. It started me thinking about the other circumstances in which we might reach for a poem and I thought of friendship.

Obviously we all nurture our friendships in different ways. It might be a bucket of lager and a football match, or a caustic WhatsApp group devoted to the boss you love to hate. It might be middle-of-the-night messages over your baby’s head during a nightfeed, or sending them a book you’ve loved in the post as a surprise. (Are my friends reading this? The answer is option 4! OPTION 4!)

We tend not to assemble our most loathed family members in stately homes or riverside pubs to declare how much we love our friends over a period of uncomfortably-dressed hours. There isn’t a special day each year on which they’re duty bound to present us with a card inscribed with their sentiments and, ideally, give us chocolate (although I’m sure there’s a corporation trying to engender this tradition right now.) But sometimes just posting a picture of them grinning like a lunatic with a heart emoji just isn’t enough. So here are some things that poets have written about friendship that I love, taken from my very first newsletter, which was written during lockdown. (You can sign up for future newsletters here if you’d like more of this kind of thing in your inbox every now and then.)

Newsletter July 2020: Poems I’d Send My Friends If My Friends Liked Poems. I miss my mates, and I know I’m not alone. It’s a giggle seeing them on Zoom, alternately blurting and freezing, but it’s not the same. I’m craving a boozy, gluttonous, increasingly shrill and inappropriate dinner out, somewhere someone else does the cooking and wipes up afterwards, or a morning-after with all of us wincing in pyjamas and taking it in turns to lie down. My best friends don’t like poetry, to be honest – takes all sorts, doesn’t it? – but in a parallel universe in which they did (and I’m in the market for parallel universes of all kinds right now) I’d send them these.

Lacing Boots by Helen Burke

One of my favourites in my first anthology of poems by women, She is Fierce. I’ve never read a poem that captured the breakneck exhilaration of running wild with your best friend at lunch break so brilliantly. Helen’s poems are full of unruliness and fun and I heartily recommend her collected poems Today The Birds Will Sing.

Fiere by Jackie Kay

This lively yet moving poem celebrates a life-long friendship. My favourite phrase is:

“we’ve had a whirl and a blast, girl”

And I’m ready to start a campaign to get greetings cards produced that carry that message. There are several women I’d like to send one to. Here’s to whirling and blasting again soon.

We Shall Not Escape Hell by Marina Tsvetayeva

This is a beautiful, searing poem about the girls who didn’t do what was expected of them, and don’t care, and will party together in Hell with all the energy and passion with which they lived. Frankly, I’m already packing.

We shall not escape Hell, my passionate
sisters, we shall drink black resins––
we who sang our praises to the Lord
with every one of our sinews, even the finest,

we did not lean over cradles or
spinning wheels at night, and now we are
carried off by an unsteady boat
under the skirts of a sleeveless cloak,

we dressed every morning in
fine Chinese silk, and we would
sing our paradisal songs at
the fire of the robbers’camp,

slovenly needlewomen, (all
our sewing came apart), dancers,
players upon pipes: we have been
the queens of the whole world!

first scarcely covered by rags,
then with constellations in our hair, in
gaol and at feasts we have
bartered away heaven,

in starry nights, in the apple
orchards of Paradise
––Gentle girls, my beloved sisters,
we shall certainly find ourselves in Hell!

To D.R. by Laura Grey

Laura Gray was the stage name of Joan Lavender Baillie Guthrie, a young suffragette whose suicide – by drug overdose – scandalised British society in 1914. Lavender, an actress, was arrested for window-breaking during the campaign to win votes for women. She was jailed in Holloway Prison with other suffragettes including Emily Wilding Davison, and force-fed after a hunger strike. While there, she wrote a poem ‘To D.R.’ (thought to be fellow campaigner Dorothea Rock).

Lavender was released after four months but her health never recovered. She began to rely on tranquilisers and eventually – tragically – she committed suicide. Her poem is a gorgeous and poignant hymn to her inspirational friend and sister in the struggle for women’s suffrage:

Beyond the bars I see her move,

A mystery of blue and green,

As though across the prison yard

The spirit of the spring had been.

And as she lifts her hands to press

The happy sunshine of her hair,

From the grey ground the pigeons rise,

And rustle upwards in the air,

As though her two hands held a key

To set the imprisoned spirits free.

Monica by Hera Lindsay Bird

And a poem about… uh… Friends, the 90s television show. Which loosely fits here and is also the only poem I have WhatsApped to my poetry-disliking friends. This absolute masterpiece requires a salty language alert but it’s a banger. Like so many of Hera Lindsay Bird’s poems it’s funny and clever and caustic and cool and then it smacks you with a dose of emotional truth you weren’t expecting.

Baby Group by Polly Clark

There are some friends that fall into and out of our lives. These are people we might lean on — sometimes heavily — for a season then never see again, but these intense friendships forged in offices (hi Stef, data inputting with me through the long summer of 1997!) and baby groups (hi Rebecca, thanks for fleeing pilates with me!) can form some of our fondest memories. I included this poem in my anthology of poems about motherhood, Night Feeds and Morning Songs, along with an article about the friends who have lifted me up, The Spirit of Sisterhood.

My Catfish Friend by Richard Brautigan

And here’s a strange, sweet poem about imagining being a catfish that just gets me every time even though I couldn’t explain quite why. Poets’ minds, eh? Aren’t they just the absolute business.

If I were to live my life
in catfish forms
in scaffolds of skin and whiskers
at the bottom of a pond
and you were to come by
one evening
when the moon was shining
down into my dark home
and stand there at the edge
of my affection
and think, "It's beautiful
here by this pond. I wish
somebody loved me,"
I'd love you and be your catfish
friend and drive such lonely
thoughts from your mind
and suddenly you would be
at peace,
and ask yourself, "I wonder
if there are any catfish
in this pond? It seems like
a perfect place for them."