Love after Love – self-awareness and discovering yourself

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 you life.

Source:  “Love after love” from Sea grapes by Derek Walcott. (1976)