Poem

I heard this poem in Cory Muscara’s 30 day course. It stayed with me because it articulates something universal and personal in a life's trajectory: when attention, care, and focus return to the self.

Love After Love is not about loss or romance, it's about re-inhabitation: what happens when energy that was once directed outward, towards another, a story, or a fixation, comes back home. The imagery is intentionally physical: eating, drinking, feasting. Reunion is not as sentimental as it is embodied. Life regains texture and fullness.

There is something profound about realizing that nothing essential was ever missing. Abundance is rediscovered rather than created. It is a shift in mindset: an understanding of how much is already within us, and how often we search elsewhere for what has always been present.

As Bernard Jaffe (played by Dustin Hoffman) says in I Heart Huckabees, "When you get the blanket think you can relax, because everything you could ever want, or be, you already have and are".

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