Like a burning fire, your image burst in my lines.
Quiet girl: inspiration for my early rhymes.
Placid, like a lake, in your serene surface,
the roar of an ocean was rushing through.
Dainty steps, and a poetry book in your rose petal hands.
You looked up high, as if searching for a star where to land.
A gray beret fenced a curl of your hair but not your soul.
In your placid quietude, my verses caught burning fire.
My cigar-stained hands, quivering, wrote verses about red roses.
My frosty rational mind yielded to the ease of your mystery.
Everything in you was ethereal, like a poetry line…
soft, like keeping a hush, autumn leaves nested in your heart.
The stillness of your pastoral town echoed in your steps
In a taunting dream, we walked together in the park, one day.
It was autumn, a sapphire sky was at its height,
and the early wind enlaced hands with falling leaves.
This nebulous, still image of what it was not.
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Author Notes
Author Notes: My posted poem here is a response to Pablo Neruda's Poem # 6. "I Remember You As You Were", also known as "The Girl with the Gray Beret," from his collection "Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair."
Pablo Neruda, 1904-1973, was a Chilean poet, diplomat, and politician. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971. He is most well-known for his passionate love poems.
As a teenager, in the solitude of my cold room, I felt warm while dreaming that this poem could have been written for me.
This is the first stanza of the original poem:
I remember the way you were last autumn
You were the gray beret and a tranquil heart.
In your eyes, the flames of twilight tusseled
And the leaves were falling into the water of your soul.
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