Most poems about memory are about getting something back. RunaMarie's «Remember» is about failing to, and its title works almost like a taunt: it names the one thing the speaker cannot do. Over forty lines the speaker reaches into the past and comes back with scraps, an object, a colour, a hand, a name, but never the event that would join them. The central idea is that forgetting is not a clean absence. It leaves debris, and the debris hurts more than silence would.
The opening stanza is the longest and the closest to ordinary speech, yet the grammar is already coming apart. "Looking back at life. / Makes me rethink my past." A full stop slices the sentence in two and leaves the second half without a subject. "My brain slipping away" has no verb to hold it up. The stanza ends on the poem's key admission, "I still can't remember, / what happened those days", and after that the speaker stops explaining.
What follows is a run of quatrains built almost entirely from noun phrases: "Rusted chains / Black smoke / broken bones / Little hope." There are no verbs, no "I", no before and after. This is the poem's most important formal choice. Memory arrives as flashes rather than as a story, so the reader receives it in the speaker's own state, vivid and unconnected. Does the "abandoned Teddy" share a room with the "lumbering man"? Does the "white nightgown" belong to a child or a patient? The poem won't say. Later, "Fevered dreams" and "Pills upon pills" hint at illness or medication, and "Red and blue" could be lights, bruises, anything. The imagery suggests, but it never states.
Many images sit in uneasy pairs. "A puppet without strings" is set against "an angel with wings": one body has lost whatever controlled it, while the other seems to float free. "Holes in my hands" recalls, to my ear, the wounds of a crucifixion, which casts the speaker as an innocent sufferer, but the next line, "Who put them there?", shows they don't know who is responsible. Even the lines that sound like answers, "Crystal blue eyes / and soft silky hair", give a face without a name. Tenderness and damage are never separated: "A passionate kiss / a warm hand" slides straight into "a broken man."
Sound does quiet work too. The second and fourth lines of each quatrain are tied by rhyme: strings and wings, there and hair, thought and caught, hand and man, dreams and scream. Sometimes the match is only rough, as with nightgown and town, or smoke and hope. The effect is oddly like a nursery chant, with neat endings clicking shut around terrible material, as if the mind were trying to impose order on what won't be ordered. Repetition adds to it. "Broken" turns up in bones, man and scream, so that it becomes a kind of refrain. "Help" appears twice, first as "Crying" and then as "Screaming," a rise in volume that, in the stanza with "Pills upon pills," gets no visible reply. The lines stay short and irregular, mostly two to four stresses, so the reader never settles into a steady beat.
The ending rewards close attention. The final stanza is the only one with no rhyme at all: "blank" and "day" never meet, as though the form itself goes blank. It also echoes the opening with small but telling changes. "Those days" becomes "that day," and "still" becomes "even." The gap has narrowed from a stretch of time to a single day, yet the speaker is no closer to filling it. If anything the loss has deepened, because not even that one day can be recalled. In the middle of the poem, "Who am I ?" shows what is really at stake. Without memory, the poem suggests, the self has nothing to stand on.
The poem's strength lies in refusing to solve its own mystery. Whether the missing day involves trauma, illness or both, the text leaves open, and the "I" is best read as a speaker rather than as evidence about the writer's life. What the poem gives instead is the sensation of the gap itself: a handful of sharp, mismatched pieces and a reader left to wonder what shape they once made.