Midnight, and a letter comes to me from our mistress: <br />Telling me to come to Tibur: <br />At once!! <br />'Bright tips reach up from twin towers, <br />'Anienan spring water falls into flat-spread pools.' <br /> <br />What is to be done about it? <br />Shall I entrust myself to entangled shadows, <br />Where bold hands may do violence to my person? <br />Yet if I postpone my obedience <br />because of this respectable terror, <br />I shall be prey to lamentations worse than a nocturnal assailant. <br />And I shall be in the wrong, <br />it will last a twelve month, <br />For her hands have no kindness me-ward, <br /> <br />Nor is there anyone to whom lovers are not sacred at midnight <br />And in the Via Sciro. <br />If any man would be a lover <br />he may walk on the Scythian coast, <br />No barbarism would go to the extent of doing him harm, <br />The moon will carry his candle, <br />and the stars will point out the stumbles, <br />Cupid will carry lighted torches before him <br />and keep mad dogs off his ankles. <br />Thus all roads are perfectly safe <br />and at any hour; <br />Who so indecorous as to shed the pure gore of a suitor?! <br />Cypris is his cicerone. <br /> <br />What if undertakers follow my track, <br />such a death is worth dying. <br />She would bring frankincense and wreaths to my tomb, <br />She would sit like an ornament on my pyre. <br /> <br />aid, let not my bones lie in a public location <br />With crowds too assiduous in their crossing of it; <br />For thus are tombs of lovers most desecrated. <br /> <br />May a woody and sequestered place cover me with its foliage <br />Or may I inter beneath the hummock <br />of some as yet uncatalogued sand; <br />At any rate I shall not hav.e my epitaph in a high road.<br /><br />Ezra Pound<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/homage-to-sextus-propertius-iii/
