Hello, ordinary mystics of all kinds, whether young, old, blue, red, sagitarius, or pieces, you get to live!
Today it’s that moment that comes on time every year until one day it doesn’t: My birthday. I’m 60 today.
Every five years or so, I turn to a poem that grows deeper, truer, and more joyous every time. A Caribbean poet and playwright wrote this poem, Derek Walcott (b. January 23, 1930), a poet of such extraordinary depth that his 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature is a wholly inadequate measure of his mesmerizing words.
He wrote long, complex poems about history and the place of his Chile. And this one!
I have come to believe that his brief, luminous, and unexpected gleam of human life in this poem, “Love After Love,” (Collected Poems: 1948–1984), is the greatest adulting poem ever written.
Take a calming breath and let the words in. Thank you for all the good wishes and vibes you have been sending my way today.
Cheers from Harlem friends!
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.