The Songs of Bilitis: II. Elegies At Mytilene: Funeral Chant

FUNERAL CHANT

Sing a funeral song, Mytilenian muses, sing! The earth is dark like a mourning cloak, and the yellow trees are trembling like tresses that are shorn.

Heraïos! oh, sad and gentle month! the leaves fall gently as the falling snow, the sun-beams are much stronger in the naked forest dells. . . I hear no longer anything but silence.

Here Pittakos, borne down with years, was carried to his tomb. Many whom I used to know are dead. And she who lives is as though she were no more, to me.

This is the tenth autumn I have watched dying on this land. It is time for me also to die. Weep with me, Mytilenian muses, weep upon my footprints in the earth!