Beams around you

Ritsos Yannis

Requiem on Poros

We keep forgetting the gods. And if we happened to remember Poseidon tonight

as we returned to the desolate shores of Calauria,

it’s because over here, in the sacred grove one July evening,

while oars gleamed in the moonlight and one could hear

the guitars of ivy-crowned young men in the rowboats,

here in the pine-covered spot, Demosthenes took poison –

he, a stammerer, who struggled until he became the best orator of the Greeks,

and then, condemned by the Macedonians and the Athenians, learned, in the course of one night

the most difficult, the greatest art of all: to be silent.

Translated from the Greek by Edmund Keeley, published in The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry, edited by J.D. MclCatchy, Vintage, 1996.