My friend for the last 25 years recently remarked that I should consider writing an agony aunt column. This was in the middle of one of our many conversations about the fickleness of human emotions and devotion, love and its associated madness and what it means to be a thinking feeling person in today's rather permissive world. I quite liked the sound of that. An agony aunt column!
Soon after this, I exchanged emails with a student who is grappling with the loss of the girl he loves. What can you say to one who feels and cannot have and cannot mourn? Words do not comfort, but for some solace, I suggest Derek Walcott and his poem, ‘Love After Love’.
Walcott is a Nobel Prize winner (1992) whose poems are steeped in the soil of his island existence. There is a sense of rhythm in his writing, almost as if his inner ear is tuned to wild drum beats.
His is a prodigious pen — 40 years of writing and over 20 poetry collections. One might consider him an almost unlikely candidate to talk so candidly about the condition of the human heart. And yet, ‘Love After Love’ is a testament to a poet’s keen understanding of that which is not uttered.
“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.”
In ‘love’ we so often focus on the other, believing them to be the missing puzzle piece of our jagged soul and self, that we look to another person to complete us. When they leave, we wonder how to go on. But there is no sense of sorrow here. There is ownership at last.
“Feast on your life,” Walcott says. Remove all the excesses — the letters, the pictures of shiny yesterdays and just be your own self. And get to know the person you used to be. For who better to know you than your own heart and your own self?
The Blue Note is Srividya’s first solo collection of verse. Read more of her verse in her blogs, VodkaWaltz and Rumwrapt
