From the recording From an Antique Land
Lyrics
SAILING TO KYRENIA © Charles Ellsworth Smith 6/19/04
Cerulean Cyprus
Like a heart beat in the distance
As our ship sails on to Kyrenia
Waves jazz like with brushes
Attack the snare drum shore
Like little hillside suns
Fragrant lemon groves
Surrounded by the azure sea
Seem to call to every conqueror
Thrust from distant harbors
Aphrodite awaits, Come
Before we reach this golden realm
Fog envelopes us all
Soon fades the bright imagined thing
So that, in a moment, the ages rearrange.
Emerging from this shroud
Ancient empires sleep walk through the mist
Persia, Rome, Venice
A long list
Come searching for the imagined kiss,
Only to reek havoc and depart
Orthodox voices chant in distant citadels
Robed in black in summer sun
While Byzantine legions gain a foothold
Only to be thrust through by Saracens
King Richard’s ships tossed by tempest splinter then land.
He builds a castle and takes a queen at St. Hilarion
Yet Jerusalem’s mirage beckons
Blood stained shields proclaiming victory to the wind
Castles crumbling walls are all that yet remain
Grecian gods cry Enosis, union with the motherland
While Turkish armies repeat the same proud changes
Erased by shifting sands.
As minarets arise
The English Empire comes steaming into mythic night
Smokestacks replacing topsails
In blackened morning light
The silent stones remind
Soon another ruler will depart.
Tombs of bygone Kings shout from a distance
We are mortal as all the others who came before
No enlightenment or manipulation of time
Can gain for us the imagined passage.
We drop anchor, our journey at an end
Kyrenia harbor in all its simplicity, a symmetry pretends
I feel like a traveler to Byzantium having just arrived
When really my imagining belongs to antique times
As we walk now
On the beach
Where Venus imagined wish vanished in the roar
Moonlight in Paphos invades the star lit cove
And sings of what is and was
Before the ancient oar
Stole the distant sea
And hid its steadfast treasure
In bright eternity