Love after Love

Still going through hundreds of bits of Peg's life. A photo slipped into a book. Receipts from a thousand years ago. Cryptic notes in her frequently undecipherable shorthand.

This was taken in May 1984 (I know this because Peg compulsively wrote dates, locations and the subject on the back of almost every photo). Today I ran across the photo and a Derek Walcott poem she had framed on the wall of her office, where her patients would always see it:

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.