George Seferis: Memory I

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Dawn, Lefkara, southern slopes of Troodos Mountains, Larnaca District, Cyprus Greek Cypriot Republic: photo by Leonid Mamchenkov, 14 February 2004

............And there was no more sea

And I with only a reed in my hands.

The night was deserted, the moon waning,

earth smelled of the last rain.

I whispered: memory hurts wherever you touch it,

there's only a little sky, there's no more sea,

what they kill by day they carry away in carts and dump behind the ridge.

My fingers were running idly over this flute

that an old shepherd gave to me because I said good evening to him.

The others have abolished every kind of greeting:

they wake, shave and start the day's work of slaughter

as one prunes or operates, methodically, without passion:

sorrow's dead like Patroclus, and no one makes a mistake.

I thought of playing a tune and then I felt ashamed in front of the other world

the one that watches me from beyond the night from within my light

woven of living bodies, naked hearts

and love that belongs to the Furies

as it belongs to man and to stone and to water and to grass

and to the animal that looks straight into the eye of its approaching death.

So I continued along the dark path

and turned into my garden and dug and buried the reed

and again I whispered: some morning the resurrection will come,

dawn's light will grow red as trees blossom in spring,

the sea will be born again, and the wave will again fling forth Aphrodite.

We are the seed that dies. And I entered my empty house.

Dawn, Lefkara, southern slopes of Troodos Mountains, Larnaca District, Cyprus Greek Cypriot Republic: photo by Leonid Mamchenkov, 14 February 2004

George Seferis (1900-1971): Memory I, from Logbook III, 1955, in George Seferis: Collected Poems (Revised edition), translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, 1991