Poems About Friendship — Written from a Dock in Dulac, Louisiana

There is a kind of friendship that does not announce itself. It does not need a name on it. It does not need to be posted, captioned, performed. It just shows up, year after year, the way the tide does — quietly, at the same hour, whether anyone is there to watch or not.

The poems in DULAC POETRY are not, strictly speaking, about friendship. They are about a place, and a way of working, and a way of carrying things. But the friendships are in there — in the rope coiled the same way for forty years, in the boat that takes two men to run, in the silence on the ride home when nobody had to ask what the silence was about.

This is what poems about friendship sound like when they come from the water.

What Friendship Looks Like From the Water

Four in the morning at the dock in Dulac. The lights on the pilings throw yellow on the wet boards. A man steps off the truck, sets his coffee on the rail, starts coiling line. Another truck pulls up two minutes later. Same time, every time, since both of them were boys.

They do not say good morning. They have used up all the good mornings. What they have instead is a choreography — one of them goes to the bow without being told, the other to the stern, and the boat is loose from the dock before the sun has even decided to come up. They have done this so many times together they move like one engine.

This is the first thing the bayou will teach you about friendship: it is not what you say to each other. It is what you don't have to say. Out on the water, in the dark, with weather coming in and a hull full of trouble, the friend you want next to you is the one who already knows which knot you're tying before you've reached for the line.

That is the friendship the poems in DULAC POETRY are written for. Not the kind you announce. The kind you earn — slowly, over years, the way a dock learns the shape of a boat. Read the excerpt from “Pray” and you'll hear it: the rhythm of two men who have spent so long inside the same work that the work itself has become the way they speak.

If you grew up in a place where the men around you didn't say much but always showed up, you already know what these poems are about. The vocabulary is small. The meaning is enormous.

Old Friends, Old Silences

There is a particular kind of silence that only exists between old friends. It is not the silence of nothing to say. It is the silence of having said it all already, of two men sitting on a tailgate at the end of a long day, watching the water turn gold, and neither of them feeling any obligation to fill the air with talking.

That silence is the most comfortable room you know.

It is the room where the friend who has seen the worst of you sits beside you anyway. The one who was there the year everything went sideways and never once told the story to anyone else. The one who watched you make the wrong choice and waited until you were ready to hear about it before he said a word. Poems about old friends are not a luxury. They are an inheritance — and like most inheritances along the Gulf, they were paid for in time, in showing up, in not turning the truck around when it would have been easier to.

Poems about old friends are hard to write because the truest ones don't sound like much on the page. They sound like a screen door closing. They sound like a phone ringing twice and then someone hanging up because there was nothing to say beyond I was thinking about you. They sound like a man pulling a chair up to a kitchen table he has been pulling a chair up to for thirty years.

That is the register DULAC POETRY tries to honor. It is the same register that runs through the poems about brothers and the poems about the South — the way men down here learn early that love is something you do, not something you say, and that the saying is reserved for the rare moments when the doing isn't enough.

Loyalty and Showing Up

There is a difference between the man who says let me know if you need anything and the man who just shows up.

Everyone, eventually, learns this difference. You learn it the day the worst news of your life comes through, and the phone starts ringing with offers, and the truck of the one friend you didn't call is already in the driveway. He doesn't knock. He just sits on the porch with you, hands on his knees, and waits. He doesn't ask what happened. He already knows. Or he doesn't know and he doesn't need to.

That friend is the entire definition of loyalty.

Loyalty, on the bayou, is not loud. It is not a speech. It is not a vow. It is a habit. It is the man who rode in the truck to the hospital in Houma without being asked, who sat in the waiting room for nine hours, who drove you home, who never brought it up again. It is the friend who never once made you thank him because he understood that being thanked was not what he came for.

Poetry about loyalty — the kind worth writing — does not glorify these moments. It just describes them, flatly, the way a man would describe weather, because in his world that kind of friendship is weather. It is the constant. It is what you build a life inside.

That is the world of DULAC POETRY. It runs all the way through the working man poems — the ones where the labor and the loyalty are the same thing, where the way a man holds up his end of a line tells you everything you need to know about the way he will hold up his end of a friendship.

If you grew up watching men like that, the poems will read like home.

True Friendship Is a Verb, Not a Noun

The friend you would write a poem for is not the friend who is easy to describe. He is the friend who is hard to describe because everything you would say about him sounds smaller than what he actually is. He is the friend whose existence in your life is shaped less like a feeling and more like a habit — the phone call that comes every Sunday, the truck that pulls into your driveway when there is work to do, the chair at the kitchen table that has been his chair so long that nobody else sits in it even when he is not there.

Poems about true friendship work the same way. The good ones don't describe the friendship. They describe the verbs. The boat being loaded. The line being coiled. The coffee being poured into a second cup that didn't need to be asked for. The truth of a long friendship lives in those verbs, and the poems that try to capture it have to live there too.

That is one reason this book reads the way it does. The poet isn't naming the friendship. He is letting you watch it happen. The way two men move on a small deck. The way a handshake becomes a half-hug somewhere in their forties. The way a long drive home from the same dock for the thousandth time can be its own kind of vow.

If you have a friend like that — and most of the men reading this do — you will recognize the shape of him in here. Not by name. By cadence.

Give This to the Friend You Don't Tell Enough

Most of us have one. Sometimes two. The friend who has been there since before you knew what you were doing — back when you were both fifteen and stupid and standing on the same dock with too much rope and not enough sense, the first time something went wrong and one of you had the hands to fix it. The one who never made a story out of it afterward. The one who is still around, all these years later, who you still don't call enough, who you still owe a phone call to right now.

You are not going to make that phone call. You both know it. That's part of the deal.

But you can hand him a book.

That is what DULAC POETRY is for, in this lane. It is the book you give the friend you do not tell enough — the one who was there before you knew what you were doing, who was there when nobody else was, who has earned the kind of thanks that doesn't fit inside a thank-you. You don't have to write him a card. You don't have to write him anything. You hand him the book, and the book says it for you, in a language he will recognize because it is the language he already speaks.

It is the book to give an old friend at sixty, who will read three pages of it on the porch and understand exactly why you handed it to him. It is the book to give a lifelong friend before a long drive, before a long absence, before something hard. It is, alongside the Father's Day poetry gift guide and the poems about brothers, one of the quietest gifts on this whole site — and the one most likely to be kept on a nightstand for the rest of a man's life.

If you've read this far, you already know the friend.

Give him the book.

Read more about the author and where these poems come from →

From the bayou. By Mitchell Parfait.

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