Amathus At Night

You chiselled the marble
into a milk-white woman
and bathed her in moonlight.

You gave her stars for eyes, hair,
lips and stroked her – Oh! so softly -
and she, now marble, now woman, spoke.

Pygmalion, she said, don’t ever forget this -
this hour, the nightvoices, the silence,
the songs of the stones, my first face.

It was the night you made her a woman,
and she made you a man.
And the waves on the shore tiptoed.


There is a legend that Pygmalion the sculptor was a native of Amathus, near Limassol, Cyprus. He fell in love with the statue he made of a woman from a piece of white marble and implored the gods to give her life. He named her Galatea, and she became his wife