Love After Love

Emerging from the pandemic can feel strange. Life was interrupted; we've missed a year of celebrating milestones, cultivating relationships, and reaching for important goals. Derek Walcott’s "Love After Love" is about re-learning how to be oneself after heartbreak. A particularly apt poem for June 2021.

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Love 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, 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.