The harbour glimmers in the distance, but the poet counsels patience: pray that the voyage be long. C.P. Cavafy's 1911 poem reimagines the homecoming of Odysseus as a meditation on desire, experience, and the wisdom that accrues not from arrival but from the journey itself. The tone is warm, avuncular, almost conversational, a voice speaking from the far side of disillusionment without bitterness. Cavafy, a Greek clerk in Alexandria who published his poems privately on broadsheets, made of his marginal life a sovereign art. Ithaka insists that the monsters and marvels we fear are projections of our own poverty of spirit. The destination, when reached, will have nothing left to give. It already gave everything by making you set out.