feast on your life

To close out the month, and the tenth anniversary of my National Poetry Month posts (still astounding to me): Derek Walcott. Walcott died in March (here is a really lovely obituary from the The New Yorker), and, as small a memorial as it may be, I kind of knew from that point on that he was going to be my last poem, this year. This is one of my favorites of his, and one of his best known, and it's also, I think, the right note to end on, here in the uncertain waters of 2017.


The time will come
when, with elation,
you will great 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 (1930-2017), "Love after Love" from Sea Grapes, 1971.