Missed out

A friend of mine died. He was a close friend and i miss him. I never spent enough time with him.

Thank God there was no priest at the crematorium, lisping
That our friend is sleeping till we meet at the trump.
He was twenty-nine, his marriage new,
His business fledgling –
Life did not get enough of him.

Nor did I take each scattered chance to spend a day,
To pass three words, or catch his arm and smile;
My absence then, he’s absent now.
And the girl I was – who waved goodbye
So gleefully to God – lies still, coldly awake,

With no catchphrase as good as His, afterlife,
To answer this:
                    my time with him is up
And I’ve but few memories to last across
The span between his death and mine.
Whenever that may be, the recollection’s stretched
Too thin to bear – a slim glass bridge between us,
Tapering to an end, high over so much hollow air.

A stone dropped down this well of sadness and forgetting
Echoes back the tender truth:
He is gone. He will not come again.