I envy you that you were born in Alexandria.
you never felt the need to look for
your life’s Alexandria.
How about Constantinople’s poets,
Except looking loathingly at their being contemporary?
Which city can swarm with so many foreign languages?
Only Philipopolis can qualify, in the North.
Thank God, they did not publish you.
Better than that, you did not want it.
Even for once to look alike others,
To bid a farewell and to give and receive blessings
was not the case for you to be obliged to…
You, old man who remembers the past by praising,
and falling asleep on a coffeehouse stool,
whatever was approaching – you recognized it.
Very well, we, the ones who line up beside you, what do we hear?
What can we say – with the mind travelling afar;
after you, one hundred years after Kavafis? However –
I envy you that you were born in Alexandria.
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