Voices
Ideal and 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 with their sound for a moment return
other sounds from the first poetry of our life —
like distant music that dies off in the night.
Constantine Cavafis
Translated by Edmund Keeley/Philip Sherrard
