I sincerely hope

That you always forget

Something in my hiking pack.

There will always be a reason

To see my brother again.

Good Friends Challenge the Mountain

When we are old men,
There won’t be much left to say;
We will look back upon
These hours of painstaking
Application of verbal bandages,
These precise dissections
Of our ego-shaped tumours,
Examined under the revealing lens
Of brandy or rye- and we will say
That we performed admirably,
Given the circumstances.

Wisdom being
The charity of age, when the light
Is dimming on two comrades
They cannot but embrace the silence,
Which far from empty is filled
With knowledge which requires
No volume, no exertion.
I look forward to that day
As much as I do another night
Spent in brotherhood,
In the storm of being fallible,
At the mast of unknown future.