Resistance moon: Give back your heart

Our poet for today, Derek Walcott, was born in Castries, Saint Lucia, and raised by a widowed mother as a Methodist in a Catholic-dominated culture. His first published poem, at age 14, elicited a condemnation as blasphemous from a Catholic priest. He studied in Kingston, Jamaica, and then moved to Trinidad, becoming a critic, teacher and journalist. A job teaching at Boston University brought him to the United States, where he won a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (the “genius grant”); he also received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992.

In “Love after Love”, he references spirituality (especially in the second stanza), but I’ve included it in this month’s collection because the poet advises us to create within ourselves, each of us, the building blocks of strength that will form the foundation of resistance. He may be speaking of recovery from a love affair, but he could also be speaking of learning to love oneself, without which there can be no love of other, or love of principle.

(In fact—when you think about it, those who claim to love principle without that underlying sense of care for self, are pretty much the ones who take us all down. They substitute the abstract for the particular and have no empathy at all.)

"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.