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