hello everybody peeps....Innocence...

ISN

Love After Love

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.

Derek Walcott

Innocence

innocence is rudely assaulted
I hear a mob's cry
faint harmony in throats
rubbed dry
and the pestilence of locusts is
unleashed

a thousand hearts beat faster
and today and every day after
a tear rusts
parched cheeks
and the trust
becomes the darkness of a womb

a butterfly is cocooned in
strands of frenzied faceless barbarism
and she breaks free born into a new innocence
and through the prism of love
a light disturbs the black
she has come back
full circle
and innocence is born again

FinsburyParkCarrots

A good poem. A fine epigram, too. I love Walcott's work.