Retrospection is an art. You use pieces of the past as raw material to carve statues. You make the words that were said rhyme to write poetry. In the scraps and crumpled corners of your work in progress, you begin to see a pattern: a face, a place, a person.
You catch a glimpse of what once was. You see you in love. And what better way to remember than with words that express the inexpressible?
Jasmines in Her Hair by author Kalpesh Desai offers poems that resonate and refuse to forget. By holding on to the past, the author brings us along a cathartic journey to reflect on our own lives and the long, winding roads we’ve traveled.
In the book, love is at the center of remembering.
Jasmines in Her Hair’s triumph is drawn from its poetic way of looking back. It balances love and loss, coming together and falling apart, and it does so while traversing the fickle line of time and memory. The product of this ‘poetry of reminiscence’ is a bittersweet collection of words with great force. It’s a rewarding book that heals the hurt and helps the happy to appreciate what they have.
‘Find me in your photographs’
Photographs capture the best of times and the worst of times. When we revisit previous points in our lives through photographs, we either remember them fondly or with a grain of salt. But one thing is for certain: All the photographs we still keep have value. Otherwise, we would not have kept them.
Take a moment to look at the photographs you keep. Who are the constants? Who survives the passage of time?
In the titular poem from Desai’s collection, the author bares his own longing for the subject in his kept photographs.
“Remember me…” the poem pleads. The voice reminds us of the worth of a photograph. You have your own regrets, your own painful past. A photograph is a way to remember the memories that you hold dear, and to always have those memories close to you.
‘We stood here once’
Time is an arrow. It only goes forward, and you cannot keep standing still in one place. But the tragedy of time’s passing does not stop us from keeping track of the footprints we leave behind with our loved ones.
The poem ‘We Stood Here Once’ captures this yearning to take a few steps back. Loving a person means memorializing them in places that are important to us, regardless of the outcome of the relationship.
We delegate some parts of our world to people that we love. We give them sovereignty over our memory of certain places, so that they become inseparable with it.
In every corner of our memory, we encounter the person we love “waiting…” like the poem expresses.
‘Leaving behind a piece of me’
It is perhaps the most endearing notion that people can remember us in the smallest things. A certain fragrance, a favorite dish, an article of clothing – these are minute details that we can never forget about the people we love.
To love is to leave a piece of you forever in someone else’s safekeeping. This can be something beautiful, but it can also be the reason we can’t forget, much to our dismay.
The pieces of the past may bring “a tinge of regret.” Or sorrow, joy, pain, excitement, fear.
But the poems point us to the true force of love and memory. They make our existence feel complete, and our experiences more meaningful. The weight of the past anchors us in the present.
Jasmines in Her Hair urges us to look for the person we love the most in all the remnants of our memories. Luckily, we don’t have to look far, because that person is ourselves.
by Edrian M. Nabong