Coming Home to Yourself

"Sit. Feast on your life." Poem by Derek Walcott

Gertrude Fiske (1868 – 1961) American Impressionist

Home has been a central theme of my last few posts: searching for it, missing it, losing it. Here in Walcott’s poem, like in my poem A Prodigal Turns Prophet, we find it never really was missing in the first place, but sometimes a journey is needed to discover that.

Love After Love

by Derek Walcott

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.

In the video below you can listen to Walcott reading his poem from his island home on St. Lucia.