Forever 21

Love after Love
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.

Today is Philip’s birthday. I have to do math to figure out how old he would’ve been (35) and how long he’s been dead (14 years next month). I think that thought upset me more than the fact of what today is. Can he slip away any more than he already has? 

Yet it is his body that has gone. What remains…do I call it spirit? Soul? Whatever I say limits what I mean. Words are twice removed – there’s the thing I’m trying to say, the way I say it in my thoughts, the way it comes of my mouth or onto the page. That doesn’t mean words don’t matter. It means they can be inadequate.

I have not posted on Philip’s birthday since 2020. What I wrote six years ago…I howled. The pain is visceral. And I am astounded, I am grateful, that I no longer feel like that. I no longer think that dying is the way to stop the pain. I no longer live in the heart-rending, hair-tearing, swollen cacophony of pain. It’s sorted out, broken into things identifiable. I am sad or happy or anxious or peaceful or unsettled or angry or whatever it is that is rising and passing. 

I thought I wanted to write something about today. Then I didn’t. Then I tried but I couldn’t find what mattered. And then – I came across this poem. I’d asked Philip to send me something today and here it is. It matters because somehow over these last six years I have come to feel kindly toward myself. I am all I have, after all. And I mean that in the best possible way. I’ve been living under the illusion that there is someone I have to answer to. There isn’t. What a blessed freedom to know such a thing.

© 2026 Denise Smyth