Writing the Happy, Writing in Appreciation?

I never had good friends in high school. Heck, by the end I didn’t really even have friends in high school. I had one or two friends, only one of which I talk to on occasion still. High school was a slow, dragging limp to the finish line. So when I came to college, and met the most wonderful group of people that I call my best friends, I felt as if I owed them writing in some form or another. I want to bring them into my writing in appreciation and in thankfulness.

My question remains: how do I write about these people I love? How do I write for people? I have so many people in my life that I want to paint into a poem or a story, but for some reason I always feel like my people-poems are lacking. I write a lot of people in a vague sense, and utilize the observational qualities that I take into social situations, but I can’t seem to get at the complexity of a person, especially when they mean a lot to me.

This spurs on another question: how do we write about the happy? The lovely? How do we write poems that are just simply joyful and full of appreciation for somebody else? Every time I write a poem, it ends up being more cynical or depressing than I originally intended…which is fine, I suppose, but I want to be able to write with a tone of joy. Does anyone else find this difficult?

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