Fragments from storms, myths, and wrecks
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[PASTE POEM EXCERPT]
[PASTE POEM EXCERPT]
That light ship, which you see, guests,
says that she was the most swift of vessels
and the speed any floating timber
she was not unable to surpass, whether oars
she needed or a sail in order to fly.
And she denies that of the threatening Adriatic, this fact,
the shore denies, or the islands, Cyclades
and noble Rhodus and the rugged Thracian
Propontis, or the Pontic gulf
where she was a light ship after, before
a leafy forest; for when on the ridge of mount Cytorus
she speaks, often the foliage begets a hissing sound.
Pontic Amastris and box-tree-bearing Cytorus,
that to you these things were and are most known
says the light ship: that out of your earliest birth,
she says, she stood at your peak,
wetted her palms [or oars] in your flat sea,
and then across so many impotent straits
bore her master, whether the left or right
breeze summoned [you], or whether favourable Jupiter
fell on each foot at once;
[And she says] that neither were any prayers to the shore gods
made by her, when she came by sea
very recently to this continuously clear lake.
But these things were previously: now that secluded one
is old, and in repose she dedicates herself to you,
O twin Castor and twin of Castor