Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska - The Poems

ROSES FOR SAPPHO (Róże dla Safony)

[fragments]
I
Without much hope, Buddha pronounced his teachings;
Ezekiel and Jeremiah hurled thunderbolts
At human passion — vulpine, hyena-like — from above;
Great Socrates thought; and Psammetichus fought
An Assyrian lion — whose jaws were death-breathing —
While you, pale, adorned with curls of amethyst,
You sang to the Pleiades, simply about love...
II
How dared you write of roses? History
Burned like a forest round you in the summer heat.
A man's brushing dust off time's annals in the library
But outside the window, back with the spring,
Sappho sings through a nightingale
Following her heart.
III
Even then – long ago, in Mitylene
And through the lengths of Lesbos –
Ignored by the gods of light, the coppice and the beach,
You, Love, fell down under the weight of tears because
Then as today – you were bitter-sweet...
V
Bronzed Sappho, Sappho with the long eyes,
Small and inconspicuous as the nightingales are,
Fell in love with a certain Phaon,
A very handsome mariner —
And young — although
He hated lyric art
Most especially the Sapphic ode.
Sister, how poor you became before him,
You who had ensnared so many demons!
How humble in his arms!
For what's a nightingale glimpsed by a deaf man,
A nightingale without its song?
What are jasmine, nard
And violets to those deprived of sense, or with no nose?
What is the magic of a full-moon night
Swathed in a zephyr scarf to someone snoring?
Sappho!
Inspired one!
Thus you lived and were rewarded, scorned
By a certain — Phaon.
VI
A suicidal poetess
Lets her violet curls free,
Stands by the water... hears:
"Sappho, what next?"
"I long to cloak my head with the sea
So no-one can witness my tears... "
(1937)