Wednesday late evening, a poem to close a busy day
I was working late last night (a talk in a small town called Tecumseh c. 65 miles from home in Detroit), then a friend whom I drove home. Up early to make coffee for this month’s half day Mission Retreat, a beautiful group of women and men who work at the university. Then catching up on misc stuff and reading emails until just now. When I read a good friend’s email. He sent me this poem which, he thinks, sounds like poems that move me.
Right on that it seems. This poem makes a place where I feel at home and welcome. A good way to end a fine day. Perhaps for you too.
If you are up late and read this before sleep, suenos dulce. If you see it after you wake on Thursday, have a blest day. Either way, the poem should reward you if you read it out loud, with pauses, without hurry.
john sj
Today’s Post “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
Sir Derek Alton Walcott, KCSL OBE OCC (born 23 January 1930) is a Saint Lucian– Trinidadian poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature.[1] He is currently Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex