Remember Me
—The Letters the Earth Learned to Read—
Remember me not for the heights I climbed,
nor for the names the restless world preserves.
The candle does not ask the sun for praise;
it only keeps a little room from dark.
I pray thee, measure not my life by deeds,
but by the tender things I left undone.
Remember me beside the garden gate,
where spring arrived before my hands returned.
Do not recall the roses I had grown,
but those small flowers left thirsty in the dust.
For in their silence lived a gentler truth—
the care I meant to give and never gave.
Remember the blue coat beside the door,
the cup that cooled beside the evening chair,
the letter folded underneath the book,
the words that trembled but refused the air.
Those words I carried past my final hour,
undelivered, yet never truly lost.
For silence was not death, nor was it void;
it was a chamber where forgotten things
awaited seasons that the heart had missed.
And there beneath your garden’s patient roots,
the rain descended like a reading hand
upon the page I never learned to write.
No ink remained. No mortal script survived.
Yet from that darkness rose a field of blooms,
each petal holding what my lips withheld,
each fragrance bearing what my soul concealed.
You thought the earth had answered only spring;
the earth had answered me.
Those flowers were not flowers after all—
they were my unfinished sentences made flesh,
my silent vows returned in living form,
my absent voice translated into light.
The garden was the letter I could not send;
the world became the hand that carried it.
So when your fingers touch those petals late,
and evening gathers softly at your feet,
do not seek me in the monuments of men,
nor in the victories that vanish like smoke.
Find me where imperfect things endure,
where broken songs still remember their first note.
For I was never what my years achieved,
nor what the world could weigh and call my worth.
I was the love that waited in my silence,
the word that died upon the edge of speech,
the seed that found another way to bloom.
And this alone I leave beneath the stars:
what human hands abandon, love completes;
what mortal tongues surrender, time restores.
Remember me—not as the life I lived,
but as the life my unfinished heart revealed.
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