Feeling angsty and flustered all week by a mountains of work and commitments with no time for yourself? There’s a beautiful poem by Derek Walcott called Love after Love that expresses the feeling of wanting to come home to that small voice within and to say, “Come, sit here. Eat. Give wine. Give bread. Feast on your life.”

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.

Born on the island of Saint Lucia, a former British colony in the West Indies, poet and playwright Derek Walcott (1930-2017) was trained as a painter but turned to writing as a young man. His work resonates with Western canon and Island influences, shifting between Caribbean patois and English. According to poet and critic Sean O’Brien, Walcott is “one of the handful of poets currently at work in English who are capable of making a convincing attempt to write an epic … His work is conceived on an oceanic scale and one of its fundamental concerns is to give an account of the simultaneous unity and division created by the ocean and by human dealings with it.” In 1992, Walcott won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Nobel committee described his work as “a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment.” ‘Love after Love’ is Walcott’s magnificent ode to reconciliation with ourselves after heartbreak.