Brian’s Reflection: Wednesday, January 23, 2008


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, poet, playwright, born on this
day, 1930, in St. Lucia, Windward Islands,
Lesser Antilles (Nobel Prize in Literature 1992)



I remember the first and only time I went to St. Lucia. I was on a launch. Like so many of my travels in the Caribbean, and especially while I lived in Nicaragua, I felt as if I were in a living National Geographic tableau. Or a Hemingway novel. This was in the 70’s. St. Lucia was lovely then, quiet and simple. I’m not sure I would like it so much now, from what I hear about the tourist trade.

I remember reading Walcott when I was there. And I seem to remember a plaque on some building or in some government museum about Derek Walcott.

“Sit. Feast on your life.” This is such a poignant poem, such a touching captured feeling. The end of a love affair – though I wonder if, no, I think they never “end”. Good or bad, they become part of our being, our experience, our makeup. Certainly they influence how we respond later to Life and Love.

I think any true love affair has to be “self-effacing”, perhaps “self-forgetful”. One has to give oneself to the other person. But, self-effacing is not – and never should be – self-denying or self-negating. One always has to have something to give. Neither person can get “lost” in the relationship. Or there isn’t one – not an authentic one. True with people, and true with the Mystery we call God.

If Love doesn’t last, perhaps it is because one did not first love oneself. One’s amazing gift of Life.

Interesting Walcott would say, “Give bread. Give wine.” - to oneself. Just as Christians offer bread and wine to God, and God gives Herself back in it. Yes, God and we, like all lovers, are in a sense One.

Brian+