484. Voices - C. P. Cavafy

Translated from the Greek by Rae Dalven

Ideal and dearly beloved voices
of those who are dead, or of those
who are lost to us like the dead.

Sometimes they speak to us in our dreams;
sometimes in thought the mind hears them.

And for a moment with their echo other echoes
return from the first poetry of our lives––
like music that extinguishes the far-off night.