Avoiding average, creating masterpieces

“If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's just going to be average.” – Derek Walcott

 

Born in Saint Lucian-Trinidad in January of 1930, Walcott won the Nobel Prize in Literature, an Obie Award for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain; a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award; a Royal Society of Literature Award; the Queen's Medal for Poetry; and the T. S. Eliot Prize for his remarkable book of poetry White Egrets.  Walcott died in 2017.

 

 For powerful and poignant reads, check out his “A City’s Death by Fire” or “A Far Cry From Africa.”  For Saturday’s Poem, here is,

                                             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.