I can’t work the loom.
I can’t cry.
I can’t bring the child home.
I can’t enter a home of poetry.

 

Carpenters, raise the roofbeams, bend them the same
as desire for the sun, through mid-sky down to dark earth.

 

The honey bee,
                      is led out for urgent labors,
                                                        nimble in her blunt agony.
I don’t want honey—
                      I want a saffron blouse and violet tunic
a bright ribbon, soft beds,
                                  your desire.

 

Desire eats away at honey, an egg, shoots
of dill. Your anger. Your shame. Your real desires.
You too cried bitterly. I want
to remind you of all
                       the life we shared.
I want to remind you of
                                  dawn, like a thief,
                                                        erasing all stars.


Poem is composed of fragments found in Sappho: Poems: A New Version, trans. Willis Barnstone. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1998.

 

 

                                                                                                       ~Andrea Dickens

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