DEHYDRATED HELLENISM

Language, theater, poetry, curiosity,
roots of nourishment,
washed away by intellectual erosion;
 

Ethnic (non)identity,
 reflected at church festival

Odysseus

13 X 2024

POSEIDONIANS
by Constantine P Cavafy


The Poseidonians forgot the Greek language
after so many centuries of mingling
with Tyrrhenians, Latins, and other foreigners.
The only thing surviving from their ancestors
was a Greek festival, with beautiful rites,
with lyres and flutes, contests and wreaths.
And it was their habit toward the festival's end
to tell each other about their ancient customs
and once again to speak Greek names
that only few of them still recognized.
And so their festival always had a melancholy ending
because they remembered that they too were Greeks,
they too once upon a time were citizens of Magna Graecia;
and how low they'd fallen now, what they'd become,
living and speaking like barbarians,
cut off so disastrously from the Greek way of life.

“Gyro, Mousaka, Ouzo, OPA!”