Love After Love

Are you drawn to poetry and creative reflections as you nourish your spiritual life? Do you journal words and phrases as you contemplate your questions for God or gratitude for life’s blessings? Today, we offer a poem that reminds us to care for and admire ourselves, just as our Creator would want us to do. We also invite you to consider joining this Friday’s poetry retreat (click here to learn more).

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