Five More Minutes With Poem: Love After Love

Written by Derek Walcott on September 13, 2012

This intriguing poem by Derek Walcott, a Nobel Prize-winning poet, implores us to love ourselves even after we have lost love. 

 

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.

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this page.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.