Game of Poems #1

Sonya Kennedy has just brightened my FB, posting poems by Patrick Kavanagh, Lorca, Seamus Heaney and Rilke. Aah. An elegant gauntlet, Sonya. Thank you. Yes, the choosing is a pleasure of revisiting and exploring new corners of old books, dog-eared from bedside perusings and harbourside musings, well-pencilled with studious marginalia.

Let me begin with a poem I loved in my studies which today cuts and salves as much as then.

VOICES   Constantin Cavafy

Voices ideal and beloved

of those who’ve died

or those who are

lost for us like the dead.

Sometimes in dreams

they speak with us;

Sometimes in thought

the mind hears them.

And with their echo for a while

echoes of the first magic of

our life come back, like music heard

at night, far off, that dies away.

(More beautiful in Greek, melancholy and fluid like memory. Buy me a glass of ouzo and I will talk for several hours about Cavafy’s verse structure and linchpin position between east-west, classical-modernist, personal-epic poetry.)

Ιδανικές φωνές κι αγαπημένες

εκείνων που πεθάναν, ή εκείνων που είναι

για μας χαμένοι σαν τους πεθαμένους.Κάποτε μες στα όνειρά μας ομιλούνε·

κάποτε μες στην σκέψι τες ακούει το μυαλό.

Και με τον ήχο των για μια στιγμή επιστρέφουν

ήχοι από την πρώτη ποίησι της ζωής μας —

σα μουσική, την νύχτα, μακρυνή, που σβύνει.





(Από τα Ποιήματα 1897-1933, Ίκαρος 1984)