Feast on your life

Love, they say, conquers all. Make love, not war. Love is all you need. Whole lotta talking about love over the centuries.

Here’s something that the rector of the local Episcopalian church said weeks after the 9/11 attacks: the opposite of love is fear. Not hate—fear. And that resonates with me as I look around and see all the slavering outrage from those who want to drive us back, whether “back” means ante-bellum southern United States, the days of Muhammad or Imperial Russia. They’re desperately fearful of the world about them and that terror shapes their every thought and every action. What a miserable life that is.

Really—we could do with a bit more love. So today’s entry for National Poetry Month is Derek Walcott’s “Love after Love”. Walcott, born in Saint Lucia, received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992. Here he 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.