Yannis Ritsos – Poems, Volume IV

Consequence

During the farewell dinner, he and his company got

drunk (all of them less than twenty years old). Past

midnight they took the roads with the laurel bushes,

ivy, guitars, and they decapitated the statues. Come

dawn he went away to Sicily. His trial took place while

he was away. They convicted him to death; then it was

the treason too and the defeat and the prisoners who

died in the quarries (some seven thousand) and

Sparta that received him with laurels. We knew well

the bitterness hiding in his arrogance. He only

missed Athens;

and Athens missed his beauty in the Agora and in

the Arena.

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