A question mark dangling between slashes opens Nkazimulo's «Remember/My First Love/?», and the poem spends its length answering that question, first badly, then honestly. The opening section insists that memory is mostly mood. The speaker remembers "a feeling I can't label yet" and admits "I don't remember much from that day." What survives are sensory scraps: "the sweet taste of your lips," "the warm feeling of your hips," "the sparkle in your eyes." Even the one firm prediction is bleak: "after this feeling comes regret."
The most striking image in this first half is memory as film stock. Recollections "come in waves," sometimes "in black and white," sometimes "dark as night," so dark "I can't even move." Then comes colour, but with a hole in it: "I can see everything but your face." The speaker admits he is guessing, since he sees her eyelids and "somehow" knows she is smiling. That is how memory really works, rebuilt from fragments and fed by feeling. The section ends with a strange confession, "I don't know who you are / And I probably never will," which turns the beloved almost into a ghost.
The sound of these lines suits the haze. Rhyme appears and disappears, as in the chain "yet / forget / regret," then "lips / hips" and "white / night," before the section ends on the near-rhyme "far / feels." That last word, a clipped, slangy noun, sounds like speech rather than polished verse. Ellipses trail off mid-thought, and the short lines have a spoken hesitancy.
Then the heading "My first love" restarts everything, and the ghost becomes a person. "You" turns into "she," and the blur gives way to detail. She has "eyes that could make stars shy away," and her hair "always moved in slow motion," a cinematic image that echoes the earlier film metaphor but now flatters instead of fading. The portrait balances confidence with humility and credits "good old traditional parenting." The defensive aside, "not in a slutty way. I'm talking positivity," shows a speaker anxious to keep her above reproach, even while the poem is about being hurt by her. "Never really had time for guys" quietly explains the rejection, and the next line sits alone, as white space makes it hit harder: "She made me feel like I'm not enough."
What follows is the poem's real turn. The speaker jokes that he might be "the poster boy for loving people that don't love me back," and the humour is plainly a cover for the pain. Two years of "my every being" went unreturned, yet he arrives at a claim that overturns the earlier "regret": "self acceptance is born from rejection." He repeats that loving her was "the best thing to ever happen to me," and the second time adds "specifically," as if insisting against his own doubts. The closing metaphor is physical. "Burns and bruises" have "reshape and moulded this fine gentleman," so heartbreak becomes a forge or a potter's hands. The phrase "stands before you today" suggests, judging by the text, a poem meant to be spoken aloud to an audience.
The poem never fully reconciles its contradictions. The first half doesn't know who "you" is, while the second knows her hair, her upbringing and the length of the relationship. The first expects regret, while the last is grateful. One reading is that the first section captures the feeling and the second the facts, and that both can be true of the same memory.
The poem is worth reading because it doesn't pretend. Its roughness, with the shifting pronouns, the slang and the blunt self-mockery, gives it the voice of someone working through a rejection in real time. Many poems about first love stay at the stage of longing, but this one moves through the fading memory and the idealised portrait to the harder question of what the loss gave back. Its answer, that being turned down taught the speaker his own worth, is simple but earned, and it explains why the poem's last word belongs to the person who survived.