1. Echo moped

Echo moped under the leaves.
Humiliated, she hid
In the deep woods. From that day
Like a hurt lynx, for her
Any cave was a good home.
But love was fixed in her body
Like the barbed arrow. There it festered
With his rejection. Sleeplessly
She brooded over the pain,
Wasting away as she suffered,
The petal of her beauty
Fading and shriveling, falling from her -
Leaving her voice and bones.
Her bones, the say, turned
Into stone, sinking into the humus.
Her voice roamed off by itself,
Unseen in the forest, unseen
On the empty mountainside -
Though all could hear it
Living the only life left to Echo.

Narcissus had rebuffed her adoration
As he had the passionate attentions
Of many another nymph of the wilderness
And many another man.
One of these, mocked and rejected,
Lifted his hands to heaven:
“Let Narcissus love and suffer
As he has made us suffer.
Let him, like us, love and know it is hopeless.
And let him, like Echo, perish of anguish.”
Nemesis, the corrector
Heard this prayer and granted it.
- Ted Hughes
after Ovid

2. White Satyr

Atop deathless narcissuses
the white satyr slept.

Huge horns made of crystal
virginized his deep brows.

The sun, a tamed dragon,
like his ladylike hands.

On the river of love
dead nymphs drifted by.

The satyr’s heart in the wind
dried out from old storms.

The syringe on the ground
was a fountain,
it had seven blue tubes
cut in glass
– Federico García Lorca
translated by Jerome Rothenberg