I would like / to be Phoenician...from my poem "The Quiet Softness" ("Don't you like me / more, now?")

The Quiet Softness

About Queen Dido, you wonder,

if at some point early enough for 

self-prevention she could have 

hung up mythology for a safe 

nakedness of, hey, herself, even 

if judged (when the world sees you 

as you were born it confronts fear 

of isolation and transformation, 

and the world detests confrontation 

unless it’s brutal and there’s victory 

or a shield or rhymed manuscript 

rendering titanic loss as fame).  

Dido was Phoenician. I would like 

to be Phoenician, say it with me, 

Phoenician.  Don’t you like me 

more, now?  Forgetting rapture in 

the arms of an accomplished heart 

or the quiet softness of a penis 

sighing, Aeneas sailed his cock 

to Rome, leaving her in Carthage, 

the city of her breasts stomach 

hips, configurations of the universe.  

Dido.  Were his promises to be 

believed, really.  You can still 

tell him no.  And it’s going to be 

a while before translations of war 

and abandonment no longer make 

sense.  In your lovely city you can

weep.  Yours, you built it, weep. 
_____
Sarah Sarai, published in Gargoyle 57, 2011, edited by Richard Peabody.

I know a poet who lives in one of the many Phoenicas; a lucky Phoenician.

Photo: a San Francisco company's production of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas. More on the Urban Opera HERE.