Last week a poem arrived in my inbox that, well, let’s just say it stuck. Deep, and sweet, and with a sliver of hope. Mind if I share?
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.
__
After I caught my breath…
I did what I do with all the best things I stumble upon throughout my digital day: I tweeted it. And then I started dreaming up ways to keep this poem within eyesight. Like, maybe write it on a notecard. Or print it out. Or make a print of it. Yeah. That.
Just then a tweet popped up from @wesnic, a virtual friend on Twitter: “I printed that off and am making a print of it…”
Hello? Is there an echo in here?
A few days later, I was thrilled to see her tweet this:
Gorgeous or what???? Even better is the story behind it. Nicolle told me:
I happened to have a pre-primed canvas, so I started with that. It took me a while to really decide what route I wanted to go. The line ‘you will greet yourself arriving/at your door, in your own mirror’ really stood out to me, so I wanted to base the piece around that. I tried (and failed) to come up with a creative, non-tacky way to make a mirror and in the end decided to go with a more abstract gray collage of photographs of stormy skies that I found in a magazine.
After haphazardly cutting those gray pieces, I added some beads to represent the brokenness of the author’s previous vision of himself (and I of myself).
The teal color of the background is one of my favorite colors and when I found the pattered teal texture that you see along the bottom (another random pull from a magazine), I knew it would fit perfectly.
I still think it might need something along the right-hand side, but I’m going to sit on it for a few days.
I plan to hang my new art in my bedroom, as part of a larger collage of art I’ve started that represents changes and feelings and perceptions and beliefs that are prominent in my life right now.”
Nicolle. Girl. You have got it going on. You just whipped that whole thing up on a Sunday evening? Now that’s what I’m talking about. I hope you’re pulling out the bread and wine and feasting on what you’ve got there. Because it’s very, very good.
Thank you for sharing with us. And thank you for motivating me to actually complete my own vision!
Here it is:
I gathered up some ordinary bits and scraps of life and layered them together. Then I pulled out my ole typewriter to pound out the poem.
I made a few mistakes here and there, and the whole thing ended up just a bit off kilter, random, hard to follow, messy…
Pretty much just how my journey has been.
And pretty much how it feels to start giving back my heart
to itself.
__
Thanks again to Nicolle for letting me feature her artwork. Check out @wesnic on Twitter—and while you’re at it, follow me too! (@shorts_n_longs)
Poem via inward/outward.
by julie rybarczyk
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