quotations and poetry

Love After Love (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 yourself.
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.

With thanks to White Hot Truth – I’ve read this poem before but haven’t seen it in a long time.
I love it.

The Layers (Stanley Kunitz)

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and how my tribe is cattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
whereever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed to me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.

(I had the first 6 lines above my desk for years, but had never seen the whole poem until now. I resonate with the question of how to reconcile the heart with a “feast of losses,” and share the sense that I am not done with my changes. Also that living in the layers is the way to a meaningful life – for me at least.)