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34
Letter From a Balcony
It is midnight
on my balcony in Larnaka bay
the darkness is mild and pleasant
like the first woman’s hand.
Listen to the waves that
swish and swash against the beach,
an onomatopoeic sobbing from a child.
Look at the moon,
it lies on its back! Resting,
after its global roundtrip,
and the crickets playing violin,
an adagio movement among the eucalyptus trees.
The song of the waves,
the Voice of Eternity, these
waves that again and again
carried invasions to the island.
They plundered and killed.
The history’s dark book of destruction.
Cultural impulses it was named in after times.
Is it strange that the Cypriots’ eyes
often smoulder with sadness
hard medicine to swallow
too few to be able
to strike back.
Now the morning walkers have begun,
young, old, dressed,
undressed.
A confusion of seasons.
They follow the foamy white sea shore,
burying their thoughts in the ocean,
the destination of all movement, the end of rivers.
But all couples walk hand in hand.
How moving this is!
White haired and overweight, but
her hand rests in his. Forgotten
are all vexations, purified
they come out of the church door, wedded anew.
Suddenly I hear a loud, beautiful
woman’s voice from the ocean.
She sings me back to Homer’s old myths,
it is the sirens’ song
that once lured Odysseus.
How I understand you, Aphrodite,
who let yourself be born exactly here
on the beach of Cyprus
and not in the cold fjords of Norway.
You became the eternal symbol of this island’s
culture.
Still your countrymen are like this:
Gentle, warm, open
to their fellow beings. Always in
balance with stoic dignity,
Zenon was one of you –
the father of stoicism.
Yes, we rime frosted souls from
the gloom of the Autumn land
open our hearts for the joy of life
in the meeting with the sun-filled culture.
I have become a continent commuter –
a kind of new migratory bird
“to my second home in the Sun.”