If You Forget Me

A few days ago i was scavenging over my trove of writings past and saw a print of a poem that i have loved for the longest time. I have almost forgotten about it and the moment i read it, all the emotions that it brought me when i first read it suddenly gushed in my memory. The poem was Pablo Neruda’s If You Forget Me.

This is my poem (well, not in the sense that it is I who have penned it but in the sense that i have owned its thought and its message since i first heard it approximately ten (10) years ago. Ten years ago when i was still looking, desperate and alone. Pablo Neruda is a master of beautifully painful lyric poetry and he is my god in free verse poetry. All my poems are mere shadows of his poetry and i am a proud child of his art.

So i want to share it with you here, now; to those of you who have loved and lost so greatly – to those who are presently in that pure blissful moment of love – and to those who are tirelessly hoping that love would eventually find them and knock them off their feet.

If You Forget Me   

I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.

The poem was also part of the poetry soundtrack of the movie Il Postino that won an Academy Award back in 1994. Madonna made an iconic reading of the poem which added a touching and emotional tone to an already breathtaking prose.