Life & Wisdom Quote by Bradley Chicho

“Companions are we” opens like a toast, but it’s not cozy; it’s a pact made in motion. Chicho’s line doesn’t build an image so much as ride one. The “mighty gallop” is kinetic bravado, a borrowed land-animal verb slapped onto the sea, instantly making the speaker’s environment feel unstable and ecstatic. You can’t gallop on water without believing, at least briefly, in impossible velocity. That’s the intent: to dramatize intimacy as a shared act of reckless momentum rather than a sentimental bond.

Then the poem swerves into friction: “quickly sliding a harsh straw basket.” Straw is cheap, scratchy, provisional. A basket is a container, something meant to hold and gather, but here it slides, failing its domestic purpose. Subtext: companionship is an attempt to carry experience together, even when the vessel is inadequate and your hands get cut.

“Sea foam gathered astride the tide” finishes the trick. Foam is the least keepable substance imaginable, pure ephemera, yet the poem insists on gathering it like harvest. “Astride” adds a rider’s posture, turning the tide into both mount and adversary. Contextually, it reads like late-symbolist or modernist sea-writing: a refusal of neat pastoral calm in favor of briny speed and tactile abrasion. Chicho’s present-tense life span adds another layer of mythmaking; the line behaves like an artifact from a poet who’s always “present,” forever caught in the surge, insisting that what binds us isn’t certainty, it’s the decision to ride the same wave.