Poem

I heard this poem in Cory Muscara’s 30 day course, and it stayed with me. Love After Love isn't about romance, despite what the title suggests. It's about the reunion with the self, and finding your way back home after a long walk in the desert.

I absolutely loved the physicality of its expression: eating, drinking, feasting. The way it turns self love and homecoming into embodiment.

It reminded me of this hilarious yet deep metaphor Bernard Jaffe (played by Dustin Hoffman) keeps using in I Heart Huckabees to describe wholeness: "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