The orange trees of Sparta, snow, flowers of love,
sprang into whiteness at your words, bending down their branches, I hugged them to my small breast and went to my mother.
She was sitting under the moon, worrying about me,
she was sitting under the moon and she scolded me: Yesterday I washed you, yesterday I changed you, where did you run off to - who filled your clothes with tears and bitter-orange blossoms.
Second Elegy Poem
Like corpses that are taken to be burned
in a place appointed for that sacred act, so in a velvet coffin I am taken under black clouds on the shoulders of my fate, and while it rains on my white shroud, the hooded nights of my life come staggering after me.
The funeral train takes to the hills and descends
into the mist. Among the trees. Into the distance where a great fire awaits me, one created from all the colored fires of this world: from sunset, from the ocean, from the stars, from fires of moons on snowdrifts, from the blaze of skies, from evening colors of Taygetos.
Blue, green, white, crimson, silver
flames, like a tangled dance of nymphs and angels chanting serene hosannas as they gaze at the lectern of the universe. And as Christ with a dog crosses the field and my mother gathers crocuses in her apron, there dances all around the fire the mournful kingdom of flowers with its shepherds, while they take me down across through the rattling rain.
My dear friends, O dear friends of mine,
I'm simple in my poems, and simpler still in my tears. Our age is shadowed; thick flakes snow through all my blood; I'm naked to the core, like a careless shepherd trapped by fall of night on a lightning-blasted mountain. Gather now my sheep. They're nailing shut the windows of night with sledge-hammers. An evil wind is blowing, it's getting dark. A rain, a frost, a moon. My coffin has filled with water. Flailed in a whirl by the mad and evil wind, blue, green, in the distance the fires shed their leaves in the mist.
The Purest Thing In All Creation Poem
Somehow there's no more darkness left at all.
I've soaked up sunlight through a thousand wounds, and now this whiteness that I cloak you in you won't find even in the Alps: this wind whirls also there on high and stains the snow. Even white roses bear a hint of dust. The ultimate miracle is in ourselves: these white expanses genuinely aglow against the universe. The purest thing in all creation then is not the twilight, nor the sky when it's reflected off the river, nor the sun on the apple blossoms. It is love.