Narrative Poem about Friendship Poem by Sylvia Frances Chan

Narrative Poem About Friendship

While the fire is still flaming,
I write here for you
a narrative poem,
it reads like this
with God's Bliss

I want to know how another year has passed by,
icicles covering barren branches and stems
after winds encircle crystal-clear leaves
in momentum, a few months prior now

post-autumn, afterwards, three ice storms;
above all, I want the world to be still

when driving towards Amsterdam,
speaking
about love and moving from town one to another,

the sky was an oyster of becoming,
or the photograph
where I bend to dance outside the Singer museum
in Laren, or, you driving across returning traffic
until D., or trees in early November after rain;
bright bulbs inside the house,
and I, pressing water on my hands into
the patterned fabric of a kitchen cloth
still an incantation of memory,
the quiet mapping of things:

an evening ripening into scent and sound
of petrichor and psycho-tourism;
above all, I want the world to remain still

and what is the difference between
grief and sorrow? trying to define
dimensions, laughing, retrieving how
the winding path comes back into
another deliverance, I call it mercy,

you call it ribbons; then night blooms
into lightning and I watch new flowers
in the sidewalk near a restaurant
where we stop for two coffees,
to have months pass like a glacier

and this distance, yet still momentum
further away, and towards each other,
speaking our being a woman into messages,
the lives and many passions of our mothers,


their desires, those for their daughters,
an intimacy of intersecting rhythms
and new strums we bring into the hours

in T., a new ice storm,
in D., rain approaches
above all, I want the world to be still
this is
sent
with God's Bliss
and caring love to you