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.

The Quiet Softness (of a penis sighing). New poem in Gargoyle

See below for credit.

The Aeneid has been one of my occasional purse books over the past few years. That means I toss the Allen Mandelbaum-translated paperback in my purse and read on the bus or subway; when I'm in a waiting room or waiting for room. Easy breezy. I've read it before so if I skip around or stop reading altogether (temporarily--there is always tomorrow's or next year's purse book), no problem.


Truthfully, no problem even if I hadn't previously read the book. Beginning to middle to end is not one of the Ten Commandments.  Anyway, this latest run got me about a third of the way through, and also a new poem, "The Quiet Softness."


Richard Peabody graciously selected the poem for inclusion in the just released Gargoyle 57. There are many many other writers in there, wonderful and more wonderful, and I'm not going to name one of them. 


I include these lines as a teaser (not spoiler).  Excerpted from "The Quiet Softness" (oh, by the way, "she" is Queen Dido, who built Carthage, a plus, but made some bad life choices).

                         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.

The photo is from
http://supphire.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/ds05_dido_and_aeneas_orig1.jpg and is titled, Dido, Don't Think of Me.

( poem from, again, "The Quiet Softness," my contribution to Gargoyle 57)