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P. Cavafy, Poems, Translated by Yannis Goumas
WHEN THEY ARE ROUSED
Try to keep them, poet,
however few there be that can be stayed.
The visions of your loving.
Place them, half-hidden, in your phrases.
Try to hold them, poet,
when they are roused in your mind
at night, or in the glare of midday.
RETURN
Return often and take me,
beloved sensation, return and take me –
when the body’s memory awakens,
and an old desire rekindles in the blood;
when the lips and the skin remember,
and the hands feel as if they are touching again.
Return often and take me at night,
when the lips and the skin remember…
HE SWEARS
Every now and then he swears to begin a better life;
but come night-time with its own counsels,
its compromises, and its promises;
but come night-time with its own resolution
of the body that wants and seeks, he returns,
lost, to the same fatal joy.
DESIRES
Like the beautiful bodies of the untimely dead
entombed, with lamentation and tears, in a splendid mausoleum,
with roses at the head and jasmine at the feet –
that is how desires look that have passed
without fulfilment; without one of them having achieved
a night of sensual delight, or a translucent morn.
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