Short Flights

Chapter 67: FRIENDSHIP’S SACRAMENT.

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About This Book

The collection gathers short lyrical poems and sonnets that meditate on seasonal change, love and its vicissitudes, friendship and parting, aspiration and disappointment, and quiet domestic and natural scenes. Many pieces favor intimate first-person reflection, blending pastoral imagery—gardens, birds, waves, and twilight—with moral and spiritual concerns about faith, striving, and memory. Varied short forms, occasional rondeau and sonnet sequences, produce compact musicality and a tone alternating between wistfulness and gentle affirmation, while recurring motifs of journey, secret longing, and consolation knit the individual lyrics into a unified contemplative arc.

FRIENDSHIP’S SACRAMENT.

WHEN I’ve partaken of your bread and wine,

And paused awhile beneath your friendly roof,

Good thoughts and honest purposes are mine,

Awhile from trivial things I stand aloof.

It is a sacrament of friendship there,

When I’ve partaken of your bread and wine;

I feel in touch with all things sweet and fair;

My pilgrimage is to a true home’s shrine.

Like the lost Arab, when his host will bring

The bit of cake, the salt in friendly sign,

When I’ve partaken of your bread and wine

Across my desert rose and lotus spring,

And in my heart there is a genial glow.

To-night above me starry heavens shine,

Yet out of clouds the brightest stars will grow

When I’ve partaken of your bread and wine.