Sunday, July 28, 2013

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.

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