What do you do to remember them?

"I have scarcely left you

when you go in me, crystalline,

or trembling,

or uneasy, wounded by me

or overwhelmed with love, as he when your eyes

close upon the gift of life

that without cease I give you.

My love,

we have found each other

thirsty and we have

drunk up all the water and the blood,

we found each other

hungry

and we bit each other

as fire bites,

leaving wounds in us.

But wait for me,

keep for me your sweetness.

I will give you too

a rose."

How do you remember your lost love and lover? Do you cry or do you write? Or perhaps you mock them or do you abuse them or unless you are a bit manipulative you remember them by twisting the story telling their lies and your truths while eliminating your faults. What do you do to remember them or to soothe your wretched heart? 

Neruda as I call him or Pablo Neruda as the literature knows him or to quote what Poetry Foundation introduction about Neruda says :-

(Pablo Neruda is one of the most influential and widely read 20th-century poets of the Americas. “No writer of world renown is perhaps so little known to North Americans as Chilean poet Pablo Neruda,” observed New York Times Book Review critic Selden Rodman. Numerous critics have praised Neruda as the greatest poet writing in the Spanish language during his lifetime. John Leonard in the New York Times declared that Neruda “was, I think, one of the great ones, a Whitman of the South.” Among contemporary readers in the United States, he is largely remembered for his odes and love poems.) 

Neruda would surely have remembered his lover by writing the above quoted poem of his for her.

What do you do to remember them? The simple act of loving someone and letting someone go, when situation is alarming and love is destructive and then remembering and being remembered has been lost in our age. Perhaps most profound and deeply enchanting work has been done by Pablo Neruda in his love poems. Neruda simply and calmly remembers lost love, expression of remorse and grief takes place and then he determines to love as I see it. Poetry is free to be interpreted as the reader feels it. 

To further my claim I quote other poem of Neruda below:- 

"Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, 'The night is starry and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.'

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.

I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.

How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.

And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.

The night is starry and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.

My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer.

My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.

We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.

My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another's. She will be another's. As she was before my kisses.

Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.

Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms

my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer

and these the last verses that I write for her."

(Translation by W. S. Merwin)

While this poem has bewildered me each time I have read it, the emphasis should be as per me placed on the lines like 

"Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer

and these the last verses that I write for her."

What does this line tell us about Neruda that he suffers from pain and this is the last verse he hopes to write for his lover but does he accuse his lover of betrayal?

Perhaps a bit in his line "What does it matter that my love could not keep her."  But this line in itself indicates such a humble origin of Neruda's sorrow. He while in pain writes simply accepting that it was fault of his love that can't keep his lover from going way, can we imagine to have this same humble origin of sorrow in someone else perhaps someone in our generation, particularly speaking of me I grew incapable of loving someone after an extent when their activities cause constant pain.....I can't be Neruda.

Neruda writes in his poem "So that you will hear me.

"Now I want them to say what I want to say to you

to make you hear as I want you to hear me."

What do we want to say to our past? Don't we have any anguish, pain, sorrow, grief or love for our past? Are we going to express what we feel or are we going to act as if we don't care? That too in a generation where not caring is considered cool!

What would be better way to remember someone, Pablo would have surely used below quoted lines of his to remember his lost one's -

"I remember you as you were in the last autumn.

You were the grey beret and the still heart.

In your eyes the flames of the twilight fought on.

And the leaves fell in the water of your soul"

--- Abhishek Tripathi

    16.05.2021