What is this? Oh, I thought it had been banished
To the boundless darkness of Scythia,
But in my rage and pain it has risen
(The madness that lives on a moth’s thin wings,
The fiendish torture of a fiery wheel).
I remember the man that first saved me,
Who has since done so at least twice a year.
He shared a surname with a novelist;
In the year of my unfortunate birth
He rendered from Latin to this holy tongue
The words of the exiled poet of Rome
(Of all your treacheries, Octavian,
Son of a god, that was your most grievous-
Worse than a centurion’s sword and Cicero!)
And with those words I rub time’s bruises off.
Such waste! I shall give myself a few freshened ones.
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