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Astyanax "Shall I Compare Thee to a Backfill Pile?"
April 27, 2000
by Matyas Dunajcsik

lullaby for the dying child

See that tower,
From which the smoke goes up the sky?
Once it's power
And pride sang songs of joy. Now what remains? The cry.

In our chambers, decay
Runs, and the night cries upon the corpses.
Charon doesn't sleep today.
Blood paints in Scamandros sacred sunsets.

O, these lofty walls!
From these, the fire-eye of Asia shot
Through the blue sea's salty halls
Light to tormented, barbaric Europe.

As a last message
Fire leaps from bastions, that "Old Troy is dead!"
The cursed marriage
Of Helen had cost thousands of men's heads.

There's no other boy
In these hell-tents of the slavers' camp,
But you - a golden toy
Of fate, that wrote iron words of your cruel end.

Once-upon-a-prince,
The hero Hector's mortal, fragile child,
A man of vengeance, as the future thinks,
But now just a participant of this shameful genocide.

See that tower,
From which the smoke goes up the sky?
There will your young life be over,
Ending the nightmare, as the ships go by.

But standing on the wall,
Trembling by the height and the graceless view,
Remember to enjoy the dawn
As it casts your father's ancient light on you.

In your tear-woven cloak,
But straight and happily stand,
Knowing, that in the Underworld
Your dead subjects a new emperor demand.

See that tower,
From which the smoke goes up the sky?
Once it's power
And pride sang songs of joy. Now what remains? The cry.

In our chambers, decay
Runs, and the night cries upon the corpses.
Charon doesn't sleep today.
Blood paints in Scamandros sacred sunsets.

Back to Poetry

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© 2000 by the Archaeological Institute of America
archive.archaeology.org/online/features/poetry/dunajcsik.html

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