Memory I
by George Seferis
Feast of St Onuphrius of St David Gareji Monastery, Georgia
Anno Domini 2020, September 29
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 glow 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.
*From George Seferis, Collected Poems, rev. ed., translated, edited, and introduced by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1995), p. 180.
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