I lost one of my oldest friends earlier this year and am still heartsore. We were very different characters and often on opposite sides of an argument. We met at secondary school and went to the same college at university but after that our lives went along very different tracks and always geographically distanced.

I recently re-read the lovely poem she wrote and gave me for my 50th birthday and decided I wanted to share it more widely; whilst the detail of it may not make much sense to others, I think the intent and message are clear. That’s part of the pain of loss, isn’t it – that shared background and fabric of one’s life becoming vaguer and more one-dimensional when there is no-one around who shared the same experiences? It gives me some consolation that I can feel our friendship shining out of these few verses more eloquently than I can say.

FORTY YEARS OF RUTH

A ruby, a rose, a Ruth,
Which would I rather have?

Let me see the thick long plait
From my tall solemnity,
Deep eyes and heart,
Three generations of Bradford
Are grounded, know the place.
An African blond doesn’t fit.

Yet she sounds like me.
She knows the place, has a view,
Speaking Swahili and
Knowing the words to Ilkley Moor b’aht tat!
The common ground appears
And maths equations bind.

Kafka perturbs us both.
The Stuarts lead to understanding
That teachers are less wise then god
And studying Catullus
Is not so easy
In an all girls school.

How bright we seem,
Growing up, exams we walk
To Oxford and Cambridge,
To Lady Margaret’s Halls
And Wadham College bar
Via Köln, Stuttgart und Berlin.

She heals my veins,
Consoles and weeps on me,
Nearly drowns me,
And mocks me rotten.
We hunt the glorious asparagus
And talk the world till dawn.

Through relationships and death,
Working hard, moving away,
Too busy, too tired,
Long silences and the odd birthday card
The core is stretched to spring back again
Stronger, shorter and more dear.

This poem is short for forty years
Too raw for artistry
Not sweet enough for a rose
And weaker than true ruby red.
Well bugger that
It’s just right for me and Ruth.

Gillian
2005