Funeral Oration Of A Mother Poem by Joseph S. Josephides

I honour you for the brave deeds you deliver to us all,
Cyprus mother, based on no one’s law, but on yours,
on the beneficial one of the State and of the Heaven;
you who concerned of lacking people, pardoned rivals,
who never considered poverty as a shame, and bought
with your few money wood for craft, thread for needlework.

Democracy is a garden, each one owns a flower;
you urged bees to converse and make honey anew,
you learned so you fed no audacity as an ignorant does,
you read the peril to know how you can grasp its horns,
never having been lost in vast and desolate thoughts,
that’s why the sea and mainland opened wide your way.

Being a friend you were offering asking nothing back;
now rich, owing nothing, you travel free to heavens,
with weak weaknesses; your faith became a hummer,
hope a reservoir, you formed love into a dough for bread.

In your funeral, your fair Memory is a praise for you,
eternal Serenity waits you and those with a free soul,
those, as you, who suffered bitterly to the very end.

You don’t need great Homer to praise you.
Let us stop crying and return to your battlefield.
Following your path, your soul rests and rejoices.


© JosephJosephides