Love after Love


The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
 
and say, sit here.  Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine.  Give bread.  Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
 
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
 
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit.  Feast on your life.
 
– Derek Walcott

"Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole."


– Derek Walcott, Derek Walcott: politics and prose