The day was cloudy. No one could come to a decision; <br />a light wind was blowing. ‘Not a north-easter, the sirocco,' someone said. <br />A few slender cypresses nailed to the slope, and, beyond, the sea <br />grey with shining pools. <br />The soldiers presented arms as it began to drizzle. <br />‘Not a north-easter, the sirocco,' was the only decision heard. <br />And yet we knew that by the following dawn <br />nothing would be left to us, neither the woman drinking sleep at our side <br />nor the memory that we were once men, <br />nothing at all by the following dawn. <br /> <br />‘This wind reminds me of spring,' said my friend <br />as she walked beside me gazing into the distance, ‘the spring <br />that came suddenly in the winter by the closed-in sea. <br />So unexpected. So many years have gone. How are we going to die?' <br /> <br />A funeral march meandered through the thin rain. <br /> <br />How does a man die? Strange no one's thought about it. <br />And for those who thought about it, it was like a recollection from old chronicles <br />from the time of the Crusades or the battle of Salamis. <br />Yet death is something that happens: how does a man die? <br />Yet each of us earns his death, his own death, which belongs to no one else <br />and this game is life. <br /> <br />The light was fading from the clouded day, no one decided anything. <br />The following dawn nothing would be left to us, everything surrendered, even our hands, <br />and our women slaves at the springheads and our children in the quarries. <br />My friend, walking beside me, was singing a disjointed song: <br />‘In spring, in summer, slaves . . .' <br />One recalled old teachers who'd left us orphans. <br />A couple passed, talking: <br />‘I'm sick of the dusk, let's go home, <br />let's go home and turn on the light.'<br /><br />Giorgos Seferis<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-last-day-25/
