When, when, and whenever death closes our eyelids, <br /> <br />Moving naked over Acheron <br />Upon the one raft, victor and conquered together, <br />Marius and Jugurtha together, <br />one tangle of shadows. <br />Caesar plots against India, <br />Tigris and Euphrates shall, from now on, flow at his bidding, <br />Tibet shall be full of Roman policemen, <br />The Parthians shall get used to our statuary <br />and acquire a Roman religion; <br />One raft on the veiled flood of Acheron, <br />Marius and Jugurtha together. <br />Nor at my funeral either will there be any long trail, <br />bearing ancestral lares and images; <br />No trumpets filled with my emptiness, <br />Nor shall it be on an Atalic bed; <br />The perfumed cloths shall be absent. <br />A small plebeian procession. <br />Enough, enough and in plenty <br />There will be three books at my obsequies <br />Which I take, my not unworthy gift, to Persephone. <br /> <br />You will follow the bare scarified breast <br />Nor will you be weary of calling my name, nor too weary <br />To place the last kiss on my lips <br />When the Syrian onyx is broken. <br /> <br />‘He who is now vacant dust <br />'Was once the slave of one passion:' <br />Give that much inscription <br />‘Death why tardily come?' <br /> <br />You, sometimes, will lament a lost friend, <br />For it is a custom: <br />This care for past men, <br /> <br />Since Adonis was gored in Idalia, and the Cytharean <br />Ran crying with out-spread hair, <br />In vain, you call back the shade, <br />In vain, Cynthia. Vain call to unanswering shadow, <br />Small talk comes from small bones.<br /><br />Ezra Pound<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/homage-to-sextus-propertius-vi/
