Response to Neruda’s “If You Forget Me”
I want you to know one thing:
All love begins with the redolence of destiny,
and ends with malodorous reek of reality.
Ever since Jesus begged from the cross
“My god, my god, why hast thou forsaken me!”
The word “forsake” has never lost its edge.
We may say “sad” and mean a thousand things,
But “forsake” conjures across the millennium
All of those things lost and cast aside:
Possessions, people, places,
All a line on an imaginary map
Drawing us back to our first memory
of loss.
It could be that a handful, a hundred
Human lovers could forsake us,
But one moment without God’s touch,
And we are drowning in endless seas.
On that day when God left you, did
You not cry out, like a mother with a
Lifeless infant in her arms?
Arms raised in agony, and breast bruised
With pain and protestation, did you
Not pull up your roots, and blow out the
Flame of faith that could not endure that
Cold vacuum, with grief in its wake?
But,
if you followed,
if you held on to
That line of grief that plays out before you
Such that the pain of loss becomes sweet,
And seen such as it is:
That every pains draws you deeper into Love’s arm,
And that Compassion had opened its lips to
Drink the poison of your grief.
It is our loss that feeds our love,
And as long as you live this truth is promised you
Without anything expected in return.