Raven" - Poem

Years like wings.
What does the motion
less raven remember?
What do the dead the roots of trees remember?
Your hands had the colour of an apple ready to fall.
And that voice which always returns, that low voice.
Those who travel watch the sail and the stars,
they hear the wind they hear beyond the wind the other sea like a closed shell near them,
they don't hear anything else, they don't look among the shadows of the cypresses;
for a lost face, a coin; they don't search, watching a raven on a dry branch, for what it remembers.
It remains motion
less just a little above my hours like the soul of an eyeless statue.
There is a throng gathered in that bird;
thousands of people forgotten, wrinkles obliterated broken embraces and laughter that has not ended, works arrested, silent stations.
a heavy sleep of golden spangles. It remains motionless.
It gazes at my hours. What does it remember?
There are many wounds inside those invisible people, inside it,
suspended passions waiting for the Second Coming humble desires cleaved upon the ground, children slaughtered and women exhausted at dawn.
Who knows if it lies heavy on the dry branch,
if it lies heavy on the roots of the yellow tree,
on the shoulders of other men, these strange figures sunk in the ground,
not daring to touch even a drop of water?
Who knows if it lies heavy anywhere at all?
Your hands had the weight of hands in the water in the sea caves, a light care
free weight with that movement we make sometimes when we dismiss a black thought by pushing the sea away to the horizon, to the islands.
The plain Is heavy after the rain; what remembers that black static flame on the grey sky, wedged between man and the memory of map,
between the wound and the hand which was wounded by a black lance.
The plain darkened drinking the rain, the wind dropped;
my own breath isn't enough;
who will remove it? Amidst the memory, a gulf - a startled breast amidst the shadows struggling to become man and woman again amidst sleep and death a stagnant life.
Your hands moved always towards the sea's drowsiness caressing the dream that ascended the golden spider bearing into the sun the host of constellations the closed eyelids the closed wings...
George Seferis