Best Friend
Give friendship the serious poem it almost never gets.
Quick answer: Learn to write poems about a best friend: friendship imagery, craft techniques, cliches to avoid, plus exercises and prompts in this free guide by Writory.
What this theme is
Poetry has spent millennia on lovers and surprisingly little on friends, which makes the best friend a theme full of open ground. A best-friend poem tries to catch a bond that has no ceremony, no anniversary, no legal standing, and often no vocabulary beyond “mate” or “we go way back.” Its materials are shared history: the private jokes with fossilized origins, the shorthand sentences no outsider can parse, the person who knew you before you finished inventing yourself.
What defines the theme is chosen-ness without romance. A best friend is elected, daily, over years, and the poem's tension usually comes from what tests that election: distance, marriages, diverging lives, the friend's flaws you alone are licensed to name, or the terrible gap when the friendship ends by drift or death. The best poems treat friendship with the same gravity tradition reserves for love, and the effect is quietly radical.
Why poets return to it
Poets choose this theme because friendship is the least examined great love. Readers have a thousand poems for heartbreak and a handful for the friend who moved away, so an honest best-friend poem meets a real hunger. The theme also frees the poet from romance's inherited script; with no roses or rings to fall back on, every image must be earned from the actual friendship, which is exactly the discipline good poetry wants.
It suits contests, too. A friendship poem that lands is memorable partly because it is rare; in a stack of love poems and grief poems, judges notice the one that makes an old joke between two friends feel like literature.
Where it comes from
The theme's towering monument is Tennyson's In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850), seventeen years of grief for his friend Arthur Hallam, dead at twenty-two, worked into one long poem that gave English the line about it being better to have loved and lost. Before him, Milton's “Lycidas” mourned a drowned fellow student and turned friendship's loss into one of the language's great elegies.
The twentieth century loosened the tone. Frank O'Hara wrote his friends into poems the way other poets wrote weather, casually, constantly, by name, and Elizabeth Bishop's playful “Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore” made affection between two poet friends into art. Between the elegy and the in-joke lies the theme's whole range.
The elements that carry it
- Private language: nicknames, catchphrases, the joke that requires a footnote nobody will ever be given.
- Shared places, a school corridor, a particular bench, the friend's childhood kitchen, that function as the friendship's territory.
- Parallel timelines: images of the two lives running side by side, diverging and reconverging like lanes on a motorway.
- The telephone and the message thread, silence on the line, the three dots, the call answered at 2 a.m., as the modern friendship's nervous system.
- Doubling imagery, two cups, two bikes leaned together, matching scars, that lets the pair appear without a word of statement.
Techniques that work
- Open inside a shared memory mid-scene, no backstory, and trust the reader to feel the intimacy from how much goes unexplained.
- Use the second person as O'Hara did, talking to the friend rather than about them, so the reader eavesdrops on a living bond.
- Dramatize the friendship through one crisis it survived, the fight, the missed wedding, the year of silence, rather than asserting its strength.
- For a lost friend, write the elegy through the private language: the joke with no one left to laugh at it says more than any lament.
- Resist symmetry; let the poem admit the friendship was sometimes unequal, one always calling first, and the honesty will read as love.
Mistakes to avoid
- Greeting-card abstractions: “you were always there for me.” Replace with one specific instance of the being-there, dated, located, weathered.
- Writing the friend as a supporting character in the speaker's story. Give them one moment of their own strangeness, opacity or brilliance.
- Nostalgia without friction. A friendship with no argument, envy or drift in it reads as acquaintance; the flaws are the fingerprints.
- Explaining the in-jokes. The moment you translate the private language for the reader, the intimacy evaporates; let it stay slightly locked.
An exercise
Write down five phrases only you and one friend would understand. Build a poem that uses two of them without any explanation, and let context alone show the reader what the friendship is made of.
A challenge
Write a poem to a best friend you have not spoken to in years, in the exact register you would actually use, no elevated diction allowed. Then revise it once, only for rhythm and line breaks, keeping every word of the original vocabulary.
A prompt to start from
Write a poem about the moment a best friend became the best friend: the specific hour the acquaintance ended and the alliance began, and what small thing caused it.
Before you submit
- One detail proves long history: an old joke, a shared scar, a fossil phrase.
- The friend acts at least once; they are not merely remembered scenery.
- The poem admits an imperfection in the friendship or the friend.
- Nothing private is explained; intimacy is shown by what goes unglossed.
- The ending resists a toast; it lands on a moment, not a tribute.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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