Phemonoe
What they didn’t understand enchanted them the most,
especially if it didn’t refer to them — those general and
vague that relieved them from most of the difficulties —
those words that hid and referred to one of their locales
(barren and unknown lands),
a place of quietness and freedom.
The priestess Phemonoe
(it was said) understood the bird chirps, the water trickle,
the stirring of leaves, and after she’d drink three gulps from
the spring of Cassotis*, and after she’d sit on the high tripod,
she explained them (with inarticulate cries) and holding in
her mouth a laurel branch.
The prophets, around her, wrote
down her cries hastily. After, the decipherers explained, with
clearness and exactness, the exegesis of her words.
Until, one day,
they showed her the written exegesis of her cries, Phemonoe
couldn’t understand them “who said these?” she asked.
And when, “You” they said to her, she smiled ambiguously
and added: “Yes, but I meant something else too”
This “something else too” fifty years later (or even eons) none
of our decipherers has explained, and perhaps for this reason
the poets still continue to write with the secret suspicion that
even Phemonoe doesn’t know what that else is.

• Naiad who lived in the spring at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi.

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