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LONG AGO
I’d like to speak of this memory…
but it’s so faded now…as though nothing is left—
because it was so long ago, in my early adolescent years.

A skin as though of jasmines…
that August evening— was it August?—
I can still just recall the eyes: blue, I think they were…
Ah yes, blue: a sapphire blue.

© Constantine Cavafy


© Translation: Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard
From: Collected poems
Publisher: Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1992