A poem by Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott
Love After LoveThe 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.
"Sir Derek Alton Walcott, KCSL OBE OCC (born 23 January 1930) is a Saint Lucian- Trinidadian poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature.[1] He is currently Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex. His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros (1990), which many critics view 'as Walcott's major achievement.' [2][3] In addition to having won the Nobel, Walcott has won many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, a MacArthur Foundation 'genius' award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature[4] and the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry White Egrets."[5]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Walcott
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All of those awards. I am in total awe of people like that.
And that's an amazing poem. I was just telling one of my daughters yesterday that she needed to be more "gentle" with herself. Of course, it's a bit different as it was after she came home from school covered in band aids from her latest tumble on the playground. 
but cute as can be, as I'm sure your baby is 
"All of those awards. I am in total awe of people like that."
Me, too, Number23! That poem when I'm at my lowest always reminds me there's another me watching, one who has not been stamped with sad things, and be able to look at oneself and say, "You're Okay, kid." And just hoping that everyone can take this message from Walcott who went thru his own crises and came up with something magnificent.
