Here’s To Friends!

New Year’s Eve seems to be a time for paying tribute to our dear old friends, maybe because of Bobby Burns’ poem that’s come to be a standard New Year’s Eve song:

Should auld acquaintance be forgot
And the days of auld lang syne?
... We'll drink a cup of kindness yet
For the sake of auld lang syne.

I came across an enjoyable poem by Edgar Guest where he pays tribute to a dear friend. Here’s part of it:

To An Old Friend

When we have lived our little lives
and wandered all their byways through,
when we’ve seen all that we shall see
and finished all that we must do,
when we shall take one backward look
off yonder where our journey ends,
I pray that you shall be as glad
as I shall be that we were friends.

When we have met all we shall meet
and know what destiny has planned,
I shall rejoice in that last hour
that I have known your friendly hand;
I shall go singing down the way
off yonder as my sun descends
as one who’s had a happy life,
made glorious by the best of friends.

From his book,  Collected Verse of Edgar A Guest
© 1934 by The Reilly & Lee Company