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A stunning poem by Cavafy

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AIMILIANOS MONAI, ALEXANDRIAN, A.D. 628–655, epitaph

Out of talk, appearance, and manners
I will make an excellent suit of armor;
and in this way I will face malicious people
without feeling the slightest fear or weakness.
They will try to injure me. But of those
who come near me none will know
where to find my wounds, my vulnerable places,
under the deceptions that will cover me.
So boasted Aimilianos Monai.
One wonders if he ever made that suit of armor.
In any case, he did not wear it long.
At the age of twenty-seven, he died in Sicily.


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Richard Walker

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Yes Ozymandias is a favourite of mine too.

Cavafy is perhaps the most important Greek poet of modern times, a civil servant in Egypt at the early part of the last century, one of the large Greek community in Alexandria, who had been there from ancient times but are nearly all dispersed by the events of the twentieth century.