Some notes on C.P. Cavafy’s “Let Them Take Care,” (w/ insights on modern Egyptian history borrowed from Hossam el-Hamalawy ) — Cavafy — an Egyptian by birth if not ethnicity —, who finished this poem in 1930, and whose own family home in Alexandria had been levelled by evahd.substack.com/p/on…, had cause to take careful stock of nationalist and military bombast, with an eye to its inevitable repercussions. In his customarily sly fashion, he chose to address the bloody, tumultuous, and depraved events of his day through the prism of the ancient past; invoking, somewhat mystically, a sort of blood-memory from the soil upon which he, an eternal outsider — part coloniser, part colonised; aristocrat and pennypincher; queer and closeted; atheist and assiduous student of religion; Asian, European, North African, British —, wrote.