Not forgetting

Beyond Forgetting 
by: Rolando Carbonell


For a moment I thought I could forget you.
For a moment I thought I could still the restlessness in my heart.
I though the past could no longer haunt me – nor hurt me.
How wrong I was!
For the past, no matter how distant, is as much a part of me as life itself.
And you are part of that life. You are so much a part of me — of my dreams, my early hopes, my youth and my ambitions – that in all tasks I can’t help remembering you.
Many little delights and things remind me of you. Yes, I came. And would my pride mock my real feelings? Would the love song, the sweet and lovely smile on your face, be lost among the deepening shadows?
I have wanted to be alone. I thought I could make myself forget you In silence and in song… And yet I remembered.
For who could forget the memory of the once lovely, the once beautiful, the once happy world such as ours?
I came because the song that I kept through the years is waiting to be sung. I cannot sing it without you. The song when sung alone will lose the essence of its tune, because you and I had been one.
I have wanted this misery to end, because it is part of my restlessness. Can’t you understand? Can’t you divine the depth and tenderness of my feelings towards you?
Yes, can’t you see how I suffer in this even darkness without you?
You went away because you mistook my silence for indifference. But silence, my dear, is the language of my heart.
How could I essay the intensity of my love when silence speaks a more eloquent tone? But perhaps, you didn’t understand…
Remember, I came, because the gnawing loneliness is there and will be lost until the music is sung, until the poem is heard, until the silence is understood…until you come to me again.
For you alone can blend music and memory into one consuming ecstasy. You alone…


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EXACTLY.
It has been a year since this poem was introduced to me and yet, the effect whenever I read this never changes.

Somewhere I have never travelled...

Somewhere I have never travelled

by E.E Cummings

somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which I cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though I have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, I and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

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I want to experience this journey.