You were the first of a select few

many times

and have remained so

both our  lives.

From being my first friend, my beautiful comrade in arms,

the first who was the better part of me and

the shoulder for my head, your unwilling soldier sending

the S.O.S. out to be rescued, to the girl I asked first and who

quite rightly

turned me down. The woman with the fire in her hair

and in her stomach, the guts of a warrior, the compassionate heart of a nurse.

Children we were, shorts, grass stains from the Lickey Hills,

wet from the river that ran tidy-like at the bottom

of the field.

Tennis balls flying over the top of my second parent’s house, your dad

Telling me how you were

When the eight wheels parked outside the house.

Summer days out in streams that refused to ever corrode the memory

of my first friend, the template for all others.

You were the first many times.

You were the first I tried to forget when I took flight and roamed,

vowing in my head to never return but thought of you

over a camp fire in New Jersey as the sea crashed near the November

bonfire and in which vanity was forgotten.

The cold, dry sand dancing in the flicker of the American moonlight…

turning to the far distant other shore line not an escape.

The road trip to Manchester, via Birmingham, Liverpool and the Mersey,

of which was my debut glimpse, and which held

a positive and beautiful outcome

for me to stumble upon just a few short years later.

Phone calls when your shoulder was replaced by mine,

When positions of our youth were reversed and in which your daughter’s

Wheelbarrow Man made me smile.

You were the first, the constant memory

of which I am ever eternal and in which my ragged thought

strives.

The games of children, the responsibility of our nearing middle age,

Remembered daily, and thanked for by the hour…

all thanks

to you my first,

friend.

Ian D. Hall 2014