Is Friendship Politic?

By

Thomas B. Wallace

Is our friendship politic, in this age of special thought?

You are a woman, I am a man,

Yet I have a wife, you a husband,

And she is not you and he is not me.

Is that politic?

I am Christian,

So are you, I think, though with a pagan flair,

With which I don’t agree,

Is that politic?

You see your womanhood all around you,

Sistering with the world,

Mothering the man children and woman children,

Daughtering the cosmos,

I see my manhood in God,

Father of us all,

My sonhood in Christ,

Brother of us all,

My femininity in that Holy Spirit of Truth,

That mothers the poetic heart.

Is that politic?

You find beauty and meaning in a leaf,

Its veins leading you down roads of dreams and paths of streams,

That open on the same vistas of paradise,

That I see in the bursting grace of galaxies born

And died in the ages of our souls.

Is that politic?

I know your poet’s heart,

Its yearning after what is true and what is True,

Its vision of the sublime in the most simple,

And its acceptance of the dark error in us all.

You know how a poet bleeds,

And you know how a poet reads,

And you know what a poet sees.

It is your blood (and mine)

They are your words (and mine)

This is your vision (and mine)

Is that politic?

Is it really possible that your political man (or woman),

Is really any better, or worse,

Than my political man or woman?

Is that politic?

Is friendship politic?