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.

from The Long Bag We Drag Behind Us

By Robert Bly

When we were one or two years old we had what we might visualize as 360-degree personality. Energy radiated out from all parts of our body and all parts of our psyche. A child running is a living globe of energy. We had a ball of energy, all right; but one day we noticed that our parents did not like certain parts of that ball. They said things like: "Can't you be still?" Or "It isn't nice to try to kill your brother."

So behind us, we create an invisible bag, and those parts our parents don't like, we, to keep our parents' love, put in the bag. By the time we get to school our bag is quite large. Then our teachers have their say. They tell us, "Good children don't get angry over such little things." So we take our anger and put it in the bag. By the time my brother and I were twelve in Madison, Minnesota, we were known as the "Nice Bly Boys". Our bags were already a mile long.

We spend our life until we're twenty deciding what parts of ourselves to put into the bag, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again. Sometimes retrieving them feels impossible, as if the bag were sealed. And suppose the bag does remain sealed. . . what happens then?

Readings of April 26, 2009