REPETITIONS, SECOND SERIES
Achilles After Death
He was tired. What could he do with the glories now? Enough.
He knew well the enemies and allies — supposedly allies;
those innocent hid their interests behind all the admiration and
love, their secret suspicious dreams, the conniving. Now,
on the Island Leuce, alone at last, serene, without claims,
without duties and tightly fitting armory, and above all, without
the basic hypocrisy of heroism, he may enjoy, for hours and hours
the evening salinity, the stars, the silence and that feeling, gentle
and endless, of the general futility of things and with only
the wild goats as his company.
But here too, even after his death,
new admirers chased him — these usurpers of his memory —
erected statues and altars to him, prayed and left. Only seabirds
stayed with him; each morning, they fly down to the shore,
they wet their wings and hurriedly return to wash the floor of
the temple with soft, dancing movements. Thus, a sense of poetry
stirs in the air (perhaps his only justification) and a condescending
smile spreads on his lips, for everyone and everything
as he awaits for new pilgrims, (and he knows he likes it), with
all their noise, their canteens, the eggs, their gramophones,
as he now waits for Helen, yes, the only one, for the beauty
of flesh and dream that so many Achaeans and Trojans (himself
included), were annihilated.
Libros Libertad 