Translated by Clare Cavanagh
The city swept clear by archaeologists
not holds secrets and techniques.
Since they lived precisely like us.
They gazed on the sea every night,
sipped candy wine lazily,
and dreamed the identical issues we do.
They knew that goals go unfulfilled.
They had their gods, quarrelsome, preoccupied,
neglectful. But there was additionally divinity,
hidden in all places, invisible.
They tried to catch it in work,
in poems and melodies, with out success.
The city plan was clear because the daybreak,
and the solar made its manner with out bother,
summer time and winter, all the time, each day.
They waited for barbarians, afraid,
elevating ever-higher partitions and towers.
(But the barbarians by no means got here.)
Time’s mild wagons crushed them;
the wheels ran swiftly, silently,
and nonetheless run.