Skip to main content

"Life After Love" by Derek Walcott

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 knew 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.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

"Kiss" by Frederick Smock

Since having to get reading glasses, taking them off has become my sign that I want to kiss you. Sometimes I call out, Honey, do you know where my glasses are? And you know, when we find them, I will put them on just so I can take them off again.

"The Music" by Sharon Olds

When I first stand up to my mother, when I am fifty--and on a civic issue-- she changes, as if she's been waiting for someone to lead her. She does not mention the beauty of her blue eyes, but says she has been sorting her late sweetheart's clothes-- and it BREAKS my HEART , she cries out. and then she cries, as if she has been lowered down into a river of music. I'm not unhappy, she says, this is better for me than church, her voice through tears like the low singing of a watered plant long not watered-- and now it can be heard, her fear of tears, as if they might take her far back to something like the swimming of the flayed in the flay. Now she lets me hear the music of her self--I could be in a cradle by the western shore of a sea, she could be a young or an ancient mother. Now I hear the melody of the one bound to the mast. It had little to do with me, her life, which lay on my life, it was not really human life but chemical, and approximate landscape, trenches and rea...