Woman Poem by Rio Murphy When she was my child I paused at the perfect curl of her earlobe. She was a comma in my diatribe about laundry and bills, my aching back, the sticky handprints everywhere, the runny noses and endless nights of fitful sleep: The Joy of Her. # When she was myself, if I looked away and back again just in time, She was a blinking cursor. # When she was my old mother with her tissue paper skin and brittle bones on which it hung, one black pupil narrowing within the colourless iris of her one sighted eye —the spoon suspended halfway to her lips Like a question mark— she was the poem I could not write. # A woman poem is a ribbon in a river flashing underwater, It catches on an ankle, Then slips away over black river stones, unknown.
LOVE AFTER LOVE
by Derek WalcottThe 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 youall 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.
This reading is part of On Being’s altogether wonderful poetry archive.
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