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Chapter 24: MORITURUS TE SALUTO

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About This Book

A compact collection of lyric sketches, reflective poems, and stories in verse that illuminate fleeting moments of urban and domestic life. Through vignette-style pieces the author observes barbershops, cafés, and crowded public spaces, probing loneliness, social exchange, and quiet moral dilemmas. Other poems turn inward to meditate on longing, rest, and mortality, sometimes adopting epistolary or conversational forms. A concluding section offers narrative metres that compress human interactions into sharp dramatic scenes. Spare language, sensory detail, and shifts between irony and tenderness bind the sections into a mosaic of early twentieth-century moods and manners.

MORITURUS TE SALUTO

When one goes hence

By his own hand alone

We look aside.

In a hushed tone

We say—“What pain has gone before

The sudden end?”

But I shall go

Because I know

No longer can the earth

Hold any other joy for me

Like this.

One night we had together,

Only one.

In all the years

For all my tears

The gods have given me

Only one night,

And it is over.

Now I am glad to go

Into the Silence.

I have breathed the heights.

I should but know

The level ways and paths

Of little valleys,

I will not, this should be.

So, Beloved,

Remember

It is because of happiness,

Not sorrow,

That I go.

From the far coolness

Of eternity

I shall look out

To the grave stars,

Singing.