Poetry

In undergrad, I was a psychology major with an English minor. I wanted to help people, but I also loved writing. I had been "writing" in some fashion or another most of my life, but as I started taking creative writing courses as part of my minor, I fell in love with poetry. I even won a scholarship for it.

Writing was all I could think about my last two years of college. My senior year, the career center asked me if I wanted to apply to graduate school for clinical psychology... I couldn't bring myself to do it. I wanted to write. Post graduation, I applied to a fine arts graduate program for creative writing - and to my great shock, I was accepted!

I loved my time in graduate school. I was surrounded by other people who were as passionate about literature, the order and sound of words, the emotions that stories can drum up in all of us, as me. I "majored" in poetry for the first year and a half, then switched to fiction. But poetry was then, and still is, my first love.

In one of my first graduate school classes, I was introduced to Derek Walcott. When I first read his words aloud, it was magical. It was as though I heard his heart speaking out loud. His words seem to speak for anyone who have ever loved, or experienced pain, or wished for more for their life.

I read this poem by Derek yesterday. It's been many years since I read it, and it still feels so achingly true and beautiful. I hope you'll enjoy it as much as I do.

"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 yourself.
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. 

Feast on your life! What an inspiring thing! Blessings to you dear friends and readers!

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