Certainly in my life, there are a couple of old houses that I would like to re-visit, to be greeted with open arms by the current resident and welcomed inside to relive my past. Houses that come back to me in dreams. Looking for poems that capture those mixed feelinsg of inaccessibility and familiarity, I came across this website of the best old house poems ever:
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.
by Derek Walcott, b. 1930
Saint Lucian poet and playwright; professor at the University of Essex
1992 Nobel Prize Recipient
To My Old Addresses
. . . O
My old addresses! O my addresses! Are you addresses still?
Or has the hand of Time roughed over you
And buffered and stuffed you with peels of lemons, limes, and shells
From old institutes? If I address you
It is mostly to know if you are well.
I am all right but I think I will never find
Sustenance as I found in you, oh old addresses
Numbers that sink into my soul
Forty-eight, nineteen, twenty-three, O worlds in which I was alive!
by Kenneth Koch, 1925 - 2002 [pronounced "coke"]
American poet, playwright, professor
(see previously posted poem by Koch & another by Larkin)
These poems and more can be found on my
NEW FORTNIGHTLY BLOG POST
~ House Sisters ~
The Fortnightly Kitti Carriker:
A Fortnightly [every 14th & 28th] Literary Blog of
Connection & Coincidence; Custom & Ceremony
P.S.
You'll notice that this week, I posted early -- on March 12th --
in celebration of my friend Vicky's birthday!
Happy Birthday to my House Sister!
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