Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your won 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 yourself.
Give wine, give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the strange who has loved you
all your life, whom you have 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