Welcome 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 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."

~ Sir Derek Alton Walcott (1930 – 2017) was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature.

"I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation... the body feels it is melting into what it has seen… the 'I' not being important. That is the ecstasy...Ultimately, it’s what Yeats says: 'Such a sweetness flows into the breast that we laugh at everything and everything we look upon is blessed.' That’s always there. It’s a benediction, a transference. It’s gratitude, really. The more of that a poet keeps, the more genuine his nature... if one thinks a poem is coming on...you do make a retreat, a withdrawal into some kind of silence that cuts out everything around you. What you’re taking on is really not a renewal of your identity but actually a renewal of your anonymity."