This week, I want to share with you all, one of my favorite poems: "Love after Love" by Derek Walcott.
Love after Love
I read this poem for the first time a few years ago, and now make it a habit to read it at least once a month.
At first sight, one could study this poem as a speech being given to a significant other. This is also something I love about Walcott's lines: the curious ambiguity. We cannot fully conclude that the narrator is speaking about another, or to another, or having a deep dialogue with themselves.
In spite of it all though, we can conclude that "Love after Love" is about You, me, and every other being.
"Give back your heart to itself, / to the stranger who has loved you / all your life, whom you ignored" (8-9). Maybe it is not about the little bits that we try to exemplify everyday; needing to correct every fault we see in ourselves, needing to push further, to work harder, to be stronger, to be better...
Instead, maybe it is about taking off the masks and pretenses of who we think we should be, or have to become, and just be. Acknowledge that our existence is enough.
"The time will come / when, with elation / you will greet yourself arriving / at your own door, in your mirror, / and each smile at the other's welcome" (1-5).
'Greeting yourself with elation, and smiling at the other's welcome' feels like an affirmation of unmitigated love. When we stop waiting for certain courses to occur, and things to happen, we are elevated to a more fulfilling peace that will endure.
Through all the mayhem and chaos, uncertainties and inhibitions, Walcott reminds us that whether we've continuously possessed an archetypal self, or have forged a self on life experience, consciousness to tranquility with ourselves is intrinsic.
Perhaps, the 'time' that will come when we have to go back to ourselves will be much later than expected. But like an epiphany, it will ring a sincere awakening.
So 'sit, feast on your life.' Find your way home, and you will not relinquish this love.
