Joan Margarit - Ulysses in Ithaca's Waters

[Ulises en aguas de Ítaca]

You arrive on the island: now you know
what fate is, what it means to live.
Your bow will be dust on a shelf.
Dust, the loom and the piece it weaves.
The suitors, who camp in the courtyard,
are shadows of Penelope’s dreams.
You arrive on the island, while the sea
beats against the rocks of the coast,
as time does against the odyssey. No one
ever wove your absence.
Neither did they ever come to undo your forgetting.
No matter how much, sometimes, reason ignores it,
Penelope is the shadow of your dream.
You arrive on the island: the seagulls
cover the beach and will not stir
when, passing, you leave no footprint
since you do not exist: you are a myth.
Perhaps a distant Ulysses died at Troy,
and perhaps some woman cried for him.
But in a blind poet’s dream
you keep saving yourself:
on Homer’s brow, precise,
eternal, every time the day breaks
a solitary Ulysses comes down from the ship.