Saturday, June 08, 2013

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Love After Love
by Mary Oliver


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 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. 

Derek Walcott, Collected Poems 1948-1984, New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1986.


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