Love After Love

It is my belief that unless you've learned to love yourself and value yourself as God loves you that you really cannot love someone else fully. Yet some think that love is the full sacrifice of our own love rather than our own life. We cannot teach or prove our love to anyone else until they can see we practice great love against our own selves.

So I say all that to present one of my favorite pieces of poetry called "Love After Love" by Derek Walcott.

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,

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.