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 t… - Derek Walcott

Love After Love
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.

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.

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.

Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor,
for the eternal idleness of the imagined return,
for rare flutes and bare feet, and the August bedroom of tangled sheets.

...and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation

The second Adam since the fall His germinal Corruption held the seed Of that congenital heresy that men fail According to their creed. Craftsman and castaway All heaven in his head, He watched his shadow pray Not for God’s love but human love instead.