For Yasmin Ahmad...

I heard from a friend some years ago that Yasmin Ahmad's favourite poet was Pablo Neruda. I was thinking, "Wouldn't it be great to have a Pablo Neruda poetry reading for her some day?" Well, now that day would never come.

As I looked at the tributes for Yasmin Ahmad, I just thought of this poem by Neruda. It's titled "XX", or poem no. 20 from his Twenty Love Poems And A Song Of Despair.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, "The night is starry
and the stars are blue and silver in the distance."

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is starry and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another's. She will be another's. As she was before my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.


We may have known her in person, or through her works, but she has left a mark on our conscience.

26 July 2009, 9.35 p.m.