Memory I

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 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.

I was fingering this pipe absent-mindedly;
an old shepherd gave it to me because I said good-evening
..........to him.
The others have abolished every kind of greeting:
they awake, shave, and start the day's work of slaughter
as one prunes or operates, methodically and 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 the
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 blossom red as trees glow 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.



Yorgos Seferis
Collected Poems (1924 - 1954)
Yale University Press, 1971
Tradução de Edmund Keeley e Philip Sherrard