Angelos Sikelianos ---- (Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard)
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Pan
Over rocks on the deserted shore, over the burning heat of harsh pebbles, beside the emerald waves, noon, like a fountain, rose shimmering.
Salamis a blue trireme deep in the sea, in spring’s spindrift; the pines and mastic trees of Kineta a deep breath I drew inside me.
The sea burst into foam and, beaten by the wind, shattered white, and a flock of goats, countless iron-gray, plummeted headlong down the hilt.
With two harsh whistles, fingers pressing his curled tongue, the goatherd huddled them on the shore, the whole five hundred.
They gathered in close, crowding the brush and wild thyme, and as they gathered, a drowsiness seized both goats and man.
And then, over the shore’s stones and the goats’ swelter, dead silence; and between their horns, as from a tripod, the sun’s quick heat shimmered upward.
Then we saw the herd’s lord and master, the he-goat, rise alone and move off, his tread slow and heavy, towards a rock wedged into the sea to shape a perfect took-out point; there he stopped, on the very edge where spray dissolves, and leaning motionless,
upper lip pulled back so that his teeth shone, he stood huge, erect, smelling the white-crested sea until sunset.