The saying goes, “He who has a friend has a treasure.” Friendship, that strange relationship of trust, love and affection between two or more people to whom blood ties are not attached but rather the very contact between them, is something practically indispensable for human beings.

Having friends helps us to live our lives positively , sharing our life experiences with like-minded people and helping us to mature, learn and grow as well as being able to rely on them in difficult times.

Friendship has been valued since ancient times, having been the object of reflection and research both from philosophy and from different sciences. This concept has also been the inspiration for numerous artistic works, including beautiful poems that try to reflect the importance of having a true friend. Among them we will see a selection of friendship poems .

9 great friendship poems

Below we leave you with a total of nine beautiful friendship poems, which we can read to inspire us and reflect on the importance of those people around us and to whom we are united by affection, having chosen each other to share part of our lives.

1. Friendship (Carlos Castro Saavedra)

Friendship is the same as a hand
that on the other hand supports his fatigue
and he feels that the fatigue is lessened
and the path becomes more humane.

The sincere friend is the brother
clear and elementary as the spike,
like bread, like the sun, like the ant
that confuses honey with summer.

Great wealth, sweet company
is that of the being that comes with the day
and clears up our inner nights.

Source of coexistence, of tenderness,
is the friendship that grows and matures
in the midst of joy and pain.

This Colombian poet expresses in his verses the support and comfort offered by sincere friendship with someone, as well as the joy and affection with which he enriches our lives.

2. Some friendships are eternal (Pablo Neruda)

Sometimes you find in life
a special friendship:
that someone who, upon entering your life
changes it completely.

That someone who makes you laugh endlessly;
that someone who makes you believe that in the world
there are really good things.

That someone who convinces you
that there’s a door ready
for you to open it.
That’s an eternal friendship…

When you’re sad
and the world seems dark and empty,
that eternal friendship lifts your spirits
and makes that dark, empty world
suddenly seem bright and full.

Your eternal friendship helps you
in difficult, sad times,
and of great confusion.

If you walk away,
your eternal friendship follows you.

If you lose your way,
your eternal friendship guides you and makes you happy.

Your eternal friendship takes you by the hand
and tells you everything’s gonna be okay.

If you find such friendship
you feel happy and full of joy
because you have nothing to worry about.

You have a friendship for life,
for an eternal friendship has no end.

Neruda wrote these verses in order to make us see how friendship helps us to move forward , to get excited about the day to day and to share and make us see the hope of a better future.

3. My friend (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)

My friend, I am so in need of your friendship.
I thirst for a partner who respects in me,
above the disputes of reason, the pilgrim of that fire.

Sometimes I need to like the promised heat in advance
And rest, beyond myself, on that appointment that will be ours.

I find peace. Beyond my clumsy words,
beyond the reasoning that can fool me,
you consider in me, simply the Man,
you honor in me the ambassador of beliefs, of customs, of particular loves.

If I differ from you, far from undermining you, I am enlarging you.
You question me like you question the traveller,

I, who like everyone, experience the need to be recognized,
I feel pure in you and I’m coming to you. I need to go where I am pure.

Never have been my formulas or my wanderings
the ones who informed you about what I am,
but the acceptance of who I am has made you
necessarily, indulgent to such wanderings and formulas.

I am grateful to you because you receive me as I am.
What am I to do with a friend who judges me?

If I still fight, I’ll fight a little for you.
I need you. I need to help you live.

The author of “The Little Prince” expresses in this poem the need for a friend who does not judge him, who supports and respects him and who accepts him unconditionally .

4. Poem to a Friend (Unknown)

I can’t give you solutions for all the problems of
life, nor do I have answers for your doubts or fears,
but I can hear you and share it with you.

I can’t change your past or your future.
But when you need me I’ll be there for you.
I can’t stop you from stumbling.
I can only offer you my hand to hold
and don’t fall.

Your joys, your triumphs and your successes are not mine.
But I sincerely enjoy seeing you happy.
I do not judge the decisions you make in life.
I just support you, encourage you and help you if you
you ask for it.

I can’t draw boundaries for you within which you must
act, but I do offer you the space you need
grow up.

I can’t help your suffering when some pain
break my heart, but I can cry with you and pick up
the pieces to put it back together again.

I can’t tell you who you are or who you should be.
I can only love you as you are and be your friend.
These days I prayed for you…
These days I started to remember my friends more
beautiful.

I am a happy person: I have more friends than
I figured.

That’s what they tell me, they show me.
That’s how I feel about all of them.

I see the sparkle in her eyes, the spontaneous smile and the
joy they feel at the sight of me.

And I also feel peace and joy when I see them and
when we speak, whether in joy or in
Serenity, these days I thought of my friends,
In between them, you showed up.

You weren’t up, down or in the middle.
You weren’t at the top or the bottom of the list.
You weren’t number one or the final number.

What I know is that you stood out for some quality that
transmitted and with which you have long
ennobles my life.

And I don’t pretend to be the first either, the
second or third on your list.
It’s enough that you want me as a friend.
Then I understood that we really are friends.
I did what all friends do:
I prayed… and I thanked God for you.
Thank you for being my friend

On this occasion it is expressed how much friendship should be valued, not as a position or competition for being the best or the worst, but as a relationship of affection and sincere concern for one another . This poem has been attributed to Jorge Luís Borges, but it is not the work of this author.

5. Poem of Friendship (Octavio Paz)

Friendship is a river and a ring.
The river flows through the ring.

The ring is an island in the river.
The river says: before there was no river, after only a river.

Before and after: what erases friendship.
Does it erase it? The river flows and the ring is formed.

Friendship erases time and thus frees us.
It is a river that, as it flows, invents its rings.

In the sand of the river our footprints are erased.
In the sand we look for the river: where have you gone?

We live between oblivion and memory:
this instant is an island battled by incessant time

This friendship poem reflects how this bond is built over time , flowing and reinventing itself through time.

6. Friends who have left us forever (Edgar Allan Poe)

Friends who forever
they left us,
expensive friends forever gone,
out of time
and out of Space!
For the soul nourished by sorrows,
for heart transplant, perhaps

Although best known for his novels, Edgar Allan Poe also wrote a number of poems. In this short example, we see how the author expresses the sadness he feels when contemplating how a friend is buried.

7. Amistad a lo largo (Jaime Gil de Biedma)

The days are slow
and many times we were alone.
But then there are happy moments
to let themselves be in friendship.

Look:
it’s us.

A destiny drove skillfully
the hours, and the company sprouted.
Nights were coming. To their love
we were lighting words,
the words that we then abandoned
to go up to more:
we started to be the partners
known
above voice or signal.

Now you’re talking. They can rise
the kind words
-those who don’t say things anymore,
floating slightly above the air;
because we’re all tangled up
in world, sarmental
of accumulated history,
and there’s the company that we form in full,
a lot of presence.
Behind each one
he watches over his house, the countryside, the distance.

But be quiet.
I want to tell you something.
I just want to tell you that we are all together.
Sometimes, when talking, some people forget
his arm over mine,
and I, even though I’m silent, am grateful,
because there is peace in the bodies and in us.

I want to tell you how we brought
our lives here, to count them.
Long ago, with each other
in the corner we talk, so many months!
we know each other well, and in the memory
joy equals sadness.
For us, pain is tender.

Alas for the time! Everything is already understood.

In this poem , this well-known 20th century poet talks about the memory and longing of lost friendship , about what was shared and what the support of our friends means.

8. Poem 8 (John Burroughs)

He who, when you leave, misses you with sadness
He who, on your return, welcomes you with joy
One whose irritation is never noticed
That’s who I call a friend.

He who gives the earliest asks
He who is the same today and tomorrow
He who will share your sorrow as well as your joy
That’s who I call a friend.

He who is always willing to help
He whose advice was always good
He who is not afraid to defend you when you are attacked
That’s who I call a friend.

This text is a fragment of a poem by the naturalist John Burroughs, who establishes different elements of what he considers, perhaps in an idealized way, friendship.

9. Friends (Julio Cortázar)

In tobacco, in coffee, in wine,
at the edge of the night they get up
like those voices that sing in the distance
without knowing what, along the way.

Lightly brothers of fate,
Dark, pale shadows, they frighten me
the flies of habit, they hold me
to stay afloat in this whirlpool.

The dead speak more but in the ear,
and the living are warm hand and ceiling,
sum of the gains and losses.

So one day in the boat of the shadow,
of such absence will shelter my chest
this ancient tenderness that names them.

This well-known writer expresses in this poem his concept of friendship and the different elements that remind him of his friends from the past .