If You Forget Me

If You Forget Me

Pablo Neruda

1
I want you to know
2
one thing.
3

4
You know how this is:
5
if I look
6
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
7
of the slow autumn at my window,
8
if I touch
9
near the fire
10
the impalpable ash
11
or the wrinkled body of the log,
12
everything carries me to you,
13
as if everything that exists,
14
aromas, light, metals,
15
were little boats
16
that sail
17
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.
18

19
Well, now,
20
if little by little you stop loving me
21
I shall stop loving you little by little.
22

23
If suddenly
24
you forget me
25
do not look for me,
26
for I shall already have forgotten you.
27

28
If you think it long and mad,
29
the wind of banners
30
that passes through my life,
31
and you decide
32
to leave me at the shore
33
of the heart where I have roots,
34
remember
35
that on that day,
36
at that hour,
37
I shall lift my arms
38
and my roots will set off
39
to seek another land.
40

41
But
42
if each day,
43
each hour,
44
you feel that you are destined for me
45
with implacable sweetness,
46
if each day a flower
47
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
48
ah my love, ah my own,
49
in me all that fire is repeated,
50
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
51
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
52
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
53
without leaving mine.

About the Author

Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda

1904 - 1973, Parral, Chile

Pablo Neruda was a Chilean poet-diplomat and politician who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. Neruda became known as a poet when he was 13 years old, and wrote in a variety of styles, including surrealist poems, historical epics, overtly political manifestos, a prose autobiography, and passionate love poems such as the ones in his collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924). Neruda occupied many diplomatic positions in various countries during his lifetime and served a term as a Senator for the Chilean Communist Party. When President Gabriel González Videla outlawed communism in Chile in 1948, a warrant was issued for Neruda's arrest. Friends hid him for months in the basement of a house in the port city of Valparaíso, and he later escaped through a mountain pass near Maihue Lake into Argentina. The Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez once called Neruda "the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language."

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