The poetry of Constantine P. Cavafy:1863-1933
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Do not debase your life. dragging it around, exposing it to the daily folly of relationships and asscoiations, lest it becomes burdensome, like an alien life.
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The poetic eyes, the pale face, those lips..I never found again
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Return often and take me at night, when the lips and skin remember
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Faces of love, as my poetry wanted them..in the nights of my youth..nights secretly met
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We were lovers once, for a month, then he went away to Smryna, I believe
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Skin as if made of jasmine...
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Sometimes they speak to us in dreams, sometimes in thought the mind hears them
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The years of my youth, my sensual life--how clearly I see their meaning now
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Like beautiful bodies of the dead who had not grown old...
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I had a perfectly erotic half-hour. And it seems to me that you understood, and stayed somewhat longer on purpose
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Your amourous face fades..and is lost
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...even more, you remain for me the dream-like face, the figure shaped for and dedicated to Hellenic love- that's how you remain for me and how my poetry speaks of you.
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To have so close so many times to the beautiful eyes and lips, the loving dream-like body. To have come so close so many times.
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...if I don't talk about your hair, your lips, your eyes, still your face I keep inside my soul
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