Promptly Poetry

Jon

Jon

As my oldest friend,
he is the link with long ago,
our childhood in the heart of Africa,
transplanted seedlings
in a foreign soil.
shared interests and wild imaginations,
grew in innocence and freedom
to go our separate ways,
he to the south
and I with a northward trend,
to be lost in the hectic journey
of life and learning and being.
Forty years of silence
broken now by electronic words
spoken across the endless miles,
the vast rift between continents
and hemispheres.
Nothing has changed -
the photographs he sends
cannot dislodge my view of him
as once he was,
pink and white under the eternal sun,
still the same imagination
and memory of better days,
he remains forever young.
Oh, he’s just as boring as ever he was,
once he gets going on his latest news,
but hit the right note
and he reveals the child still living within.
We’re both happiest when
the talk turns to “Do you remember when?”
and “You used to say…”
The truth is he is my rock,
the stalwart, solid sentinel
in the stream of passing time
and, it may be, considering his tenacity
in continuing our sometimes sporadic
conversation, that I am to him
the same lifeline to our shared history.
It would be nice if it were so.


Line Count: 40
Free Verse
For Promptly Poetry, Week 12 2020
Prompt: Think of a friend or family member who has played a huge role in your life. Write a poem about that relationship.
Note: This proved an extremely difficult task for me. I have already written a long piece on the greatest influence on my life, my English Literature teacher in school, Johnny Bridle. I tried to write a poem saying the same thing but, having said it once, I found there was no more to say. So I needed someone else and then Jon popped into my head. He was not exactly a huge influence on my life but, as the sole existent link to my childhood plus his retention of the same crazy ideas he always had, he is something solid to hang on to in the chaos of life.