"The Moon is Down"
By Silver Spun Sand
- 864 reads
“Someone will remember us
I say, even in another time.”
‘Sappho’
The gods smiled down on her...
aeons ago, around six hundred BC.
In her wildest dreams, could she
ever have foreseen some of her finest
poetry would find its way from Lesbos
to Egypt to lie amongst fish-heads
and rubble on a rubbish tip, perfectly
preserved, for two thousand years?
An ancient ‘stig of the dump’ found
her poems scribed on a dozen sheets
of papyrus in nineteen-twenty-two.
His hands atremble as carefully,
he unfurled them with gnarled
and twisted fingers, and thus he read;
all about a man called Tithonus,
so handsome, he won the heart
of the goddess of dawn who loved him
so much she couldn’t bear the thought,
flesh and blood as he was, one day
she would lose him.
Zeus, granted her wish and gave him
immortality, despite it having slipped
her mind to ask for eternal youth
as part of the deal.
Tears in the ancient’s eyes, he stopped reading.
Death, where indeed – its sting?
Drifted on the wind snatches of a song;
the voice, somehow, he knew.
“Sappho!” he cried.
“Teach it to me, please.
For I would learn it and die.”
And the vultures,
circling overhead in violet skies,
upped and flew, somewhere
the other side
of a fallen moon.
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Comments
Goddess of inspiration. You -
Goddess of inspiration. You - not Sappho! I can't imagine how they've pieced the rubble of her work together over the years, can you? Love how this comes full circle - you often change 'style'' but this is an exciting one!
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Much still flows into our
Much still flows into our culture from ancient Greece. Stephen Daedalus, in Joyce's Ulysses, wants to rejuvenate Ireland by adopting ancient Greek culture into Ireland. Leopold Bloom is the humanist, Jewish option. I have no idea what Molly Bloom represents... perhaps natural, Irish option? We tend to think that ancient Greek culture was so kind to lesbians, but I think it was only in Lesbos that it was so open. Ancient Greek culture, in general, was a very militaristic culture. Hippies may find inspiration in ancient Greece but the Athenians, I believe, would watch a play by one of the poets (I am having a blonde moment here) and then go off to War knowing that THAT was what had to be done. Must it be? It Must be. Joseph Campbell who was a conservative who hung around alot of hippy leftist women also encouraged the warrior spirit. Let's face it, the West is being attacked left and right by the rest of the world. We need to defend ourselves or life is going to turn into a Dionysian nightmare where everything is permitted and our intellect just disappears. You might say it doesn't matter and that the disappearance of the intellect will bring about a new age of religion, but this is nonsense. It's true Meister Eckhart did say, to paraphrase, the last giving up fro God is the giving up of the Intellect, but even then there is still thought.
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