friends and poems = true soul food

Friend,

by Jean Valentine

You came in a dream, yesterday 

--The first day we met 

you showed me your dark workroom 

off the kitchen, your books, your notebooks. 

Reading our last, knowing-last letters 

--the years of our friendship 

reading our poems to each other, 

I would start breathing again. 

Yesterday, in the afternoon, 

more than a year since you died, 

some words came into the air. 

I looked away a second, 

and they were gone, 

six lines, just passing through.

for Adrienne Rich