Love Poetry: If You Remember Me

by Susan Sheppard
(Parkersburg, West Virginia)

'If You Remember Me

In response to “If You Forget Me” by Pablo Neruda

Love,
Do you remember how you
Floated inside your mother’s body
As a gold cell on dark red foam?

That maroon dream inside your brain,
With eyelids as petals
Not yet open to the world?

In the night of my childhood, that violet dark
Held a promise, somewhere you existed
But you were not yet born.

Creased in my skin, you were only
A longing, without shape or future;
I knew you were somewhere
But I did not know where.

Now,
my love for you is an astounded flower.
And already you are my loss.

One day you arrived;
Eyes black as irises blooming
At the edge of my yard, skin lunar white,
Numinous clouds of hair.

As it is, you are perfected
In my sight. All that is
Holy and beautiful
Nests its potential inside of you.

Yet now as we are, we are
Separated by the jails of
Our bodies as watchers

Fastened to bars,
In the same way vines climb
Soundlessly as non-existent things

Until a blossom occurs
And announces itself
With such a strange, criminal beauty
It must be observed.

Love, if in some other time
You remember me as I have
Remembered you,

Promise then you will not disappear,
The way shadows sometimes
Chase away afternoon light
Leaving love’s sweetness
To die at nighttime
In the meadows.'

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