When I Think Of My Friends/No Longer Here Poem by Shalom Freedman

When I think of the friends
No longer here
I feel a strange and terrible loneliness
As if the world is empty
And I am wholly alone in it
A kind of inner devastation and meaningless
I cannot understand.

Why should I go on
If there is no one to meet and talk with
No one just to be with
For the pleasure of it?

Still there a few left
And family.

But the missing of these friends
Becomes too real too often.

I sometimes see one of them walking somewhere
And after I in an instant think
This could not be possibly be them
And am deeply disappointed
When I discover it's not.