Most love poems fear losing a person. Beshoy Emad's poem, which has three asterisks where a title would be, fears something quieter and in some ways crueler: that the love will still be there to remember, and the one who loved will have lost the memory of it. The central idea is that memory is the last place a relationship lives, and that forgetting is a second loss, one that can't be seen or grieved in the same way.
The first stanza is built from a single sentence pattern, "Afraid to forget that I love you / Afraid to forget that I need you," and the grammar is revealing. The speaker does not fear forgetting *you*. He or she fears forgetting *that* they love, *that* they need. Love is treated as a piece of knowledge, something that has to be held onto deliberately, because feelings fade when no one is there to receive them. Then comes the shortest and most important line: "That I had you." The first two verbs, "love" and "need," are in the present tense. The third, "had," is in the past. In three lines the poem slides from what is to what was, and the reader understands, without being told, that something has ended. Judging by the text alone, we cannot say whether this is death or separation, and the poem never explains. That silence works in its favour, since anyone who has lost someone can read their own loss into it.
The second stanza turns from the abstract to the physical. What the speaker is afraid to forget is "the sound of your laugh," "your scent," "your touch." These are three senses (hearing, smell, touch), and none of them is a face or a description. The details are small, bodily and hard to hold in memory. A photograph can preserve a face, but nothing preserves a laugh or a smell, which is exactly why they are the first things to go. The poet seems to know that love is stored in such fragments, and that the fragments are fragile.
The form carries the same anxiety. There is no rhyme and no regular metre; the poem is free verse, and its short lines sound like someone speaking carefully, almost afraid to say too much. The repeated "Afraid to forget" works like a rehearsal, the way you repeat a phone number to keep it in your head. The word "forget" appears four times in seven lines, so the poem keeps naming the very thing it dreads. The lines also shrink as the second stanza goes on, from "Afraid to forget the sound of your laugh," to "To forget your scent," to the clipped "Your touch." Each line holds less than the one before, as if the memory were thinning out as we read.
Then the ending breaks the pattern: "And, that I had such love." The odd comma after "And" is a small hesitation, a catch in the voice. The line also echoes "That I had you," but with a change. Now the speaker has "such love" rather than "you." The focus has moved from the person to the experience itself, a love so large that it deserves the word "such." That may be a first step toward acceptance, since the person is gone but the fact of having loved cannot be taken away, unless it is forgotten.
That is why the poem matters, and why it is more than a sad confession. Its language is plain and its images are few, yet the poem is itself an act against forgetting. By writing the fear down, the speaker fixes the laugh, the scent and the touch in words, so that they exist somewhere outside a fading mind. The poem is small, but it shows what poetry can do: it keeps a record of feeling when memory cannot be trusted to.