Imperceptibly
Walls
With no consideration, no pity, no shame,
they have built walls around me, thick and high.
And now I sit here feeling hopeless.
I can’t think of anything else: this fate gnaws my mind –
because I had so much to do outside.
When they were building the walls, how could I not have noticed!
But I never heard the builders, not a sound.
Imperceptibly they have closed me off from the outside world.
Constantine P. Cavafy (1897)
C.P. Cavafy, Collected Poems, Translated by Edmund Keely and Philip Sherrard, Edited by George Savidis,, Chatto &Windus, London 1998
