Friend I need your hand every morning
but anger and beauty and hope
these roses make one rose.
Friend I need a hand every evening
but anger and hope and beauty
are three roses
that make one rose.
Let's fix our bed it's in splinters
and I want to stay all year.
Let's fix our bed it's in splinters
and I want to stay all year.
Did you hear what that woman on Grafton Street was saying?
You won't be killed today.
We don't even know we're born.
 
From Door in the Mountain. Copyright © 2004 by Jean Valentine. Reprinted with permission of Wesleyan University Press.

Poems by This Author

Annunciation by Jean Valentine
I saw my soul become flesh
Door in the Mountain by Jean Valentine
Eleventh Brother by Jean Valentine
one arm still a swan's wing
Father Lynch Returns from the Dead by Jean Valentine
There's one day a year
Fellini in Purgatory by Jean Valentine
He was shoveling sand
Ghost Elephants by Jean Valentine
In the elephant field
Hospital: strange lights by Jean Valentine
I needed a friend but
I have lived in your face by Jean Valentine
I have lived in your face
La Chalupa, the Boat by Jean Valentine
I am twenty
Red Cloth by Jean Valentine
Red cloth
Susan's Photograph by Jean Valentine
The Branches by Jean Valentine
The branches looked first like tepees
To the Black Madonna of Chartres by Jean Valentine
Friend or no friend


Further Reading

Poems About Friendship
After the Movie
by Marie Howe
Book Loaned to Tom Andrews
by Bobby C. Rogers
Dear Friends
by Edwin Arlington Robinson
For N & K
by Gina Myers
From the Lives of My Friends
by Michael Dickman
Heaven for Helen
by Mark Doty
Heaven for Stanley
by Mark Doty
How I Am
by Jason Shinder
Mending Wall
by Robert Frost
On Gifts For Grace
by Bernadette Mayer
sisters
by Lucille Clifton
Skunk Hour
by Robert Lowell
Song of Myself, X
by Walt Whitman
Stanzas in Meditation
by Gertrude Stein
The Armadillo
by Elizabeth Bishop
The Soul unto itself (683)
by Emily Dickinson
This Lime Tree Bower My Prison
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
To a Friend who sent me some Roses
by John Keats
To Thomas Moore
by George Gordon Byron
Travelling
by William Wordsworth
We Have Been Friends Together
by Caroline Elizabeth Sarah Norton
You & I Belong in This Kitchen
by Juan Felipe Herrera
Your Catfish Friend
by Richard Brautigan