When the Queen Mother of England died in 2002, her daughter Elizabeth II recited a poem.
It wasn’t by a classic British author, or even a well-known poet, the poem was titled Remember Me, and it’s anonymous poetry that had been circulating the internet for years.
To date, the poem has been shared more than 500 thousand times on Facebook, in less than two months since its publication on the page El Blog del Maestro, and for a time its origin was a complete mystery.
However, the verses were not anonymous. Five months after the funeral, the author of it appeared: his name is David Harkins and he is an amateur poet from the county of Cumbria, in the north of England.
It was not originally conceived as a funerary poem, but as one of love, addressed to a young woman with whom David was in love. In the 1980s David sent this poem along with others to various magazines and publishers with the intention that they publish it. He never received a formal response but it was published without mentioning his name.
It appeared on compilations and eventually hit the internet, where it has touched millions of people for over 10 years.
Remember me
You can cry because he’s gone, or you can
smile because he has lived.
You can close your eyes and pray that he comes back or you can open them and see all that he has
left;
your heart may be empty
because you can’t see it,
or can be full
of the love they shared.
You can cry, close your mind, feel the emptiness and turn your back, or
you can do what she would like:
smile, open your eyes, love and move on.