This is a poem that has stayed with me, arousing
conflicting emotions, sometimes hopeful, sometimes
totally unbelieving, yet always a dream to attain.
Here it is again:
“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
This has been a pressured week, completing financial records,
putting order in clutter, not a lot of fun, wondering why I do any
of this at all! The ‘homework’.
And then, out of the blue this week, three dreams simply clear
and uncluttered, landed me straight in the middle of the poem.
All of that, exactly as it was written, happened to me, all of it.
My daughters may rest easy. I’m lining up the wine and the
bread and my heart for that feast of a life.
If it can happen to me, it can happen to you, too.
Really.
Sit. Read it again.
with love …
Mom/Mimi/Toni/Antoinette