The time HAS come

This might be my favorite poem - or, perhaps it is the prophecy I heard sometime in my forties, and now it has come true. If I assembled a little volume of favorites, this one would be the first in a section, and the section would be titled: "The Time Will Come ~ I Promise." This poem has become my Birthday Poem.

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, 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.