4. Remon
Constantine P. Cavafy
In A Town of Osroini
Yesterday, around midnight, they brought us our friend Remon,
who’d been wounded in a taverna fight.
Through the windows we left wide open,
the moon cast light over his beautiful body as it lay on the bed.
We’re a mixture here: Syrians, immigrant Greeks, Armenians, Medes.
Remon is one of these too. But last night,
when the moon shone on his sensual face,
our thoughts went back to Plato’s Charmidis.
Constantine P. Cavafy (1917)
Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrand
