Whom shall I persuade? Her? You? I will
not concur I’ll stop loving you by spring
I want to remind you of all the urgent
labors awash in the storm, alive with our cargo.
Your anger is like a small child with no charm, is like
cobbling together beach refuse. Those etched by love
had their fill of your severe luminous oath
held out, a tender girl lying trampled.
No one will remember or miss you.
Poem is composed of fragments found in Sappho: Poems: A New Version, trans. Willis Barnstone. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1998.
~Andrea Dickens