After Sappho

My life’s story returns to Sappho:

Her ends connect to my beginnings. 

Her beginnings to my ends.

I am, and will not be, 

because she was, and is not.

I am little more than a fragment of her words,

reborn from the waters, washed up on a shore, 

abandoned through history, stained and torn, 

metaphors and half rhymes in the half-written dawn. 

I am, because I looked back and saw, 

not all-consuming darkness, but the dim light  

that alone can shake the leaves. 

I am, because she taught me that I could, 

lines carefully separated and delicately reformed 

into the feeling of returning home,  

calling out to me from within my bones.

Oh, to touch the hand that wrote,

to witness the mind that breathes fire.

A memory of love. To know

that she was real, to tell her what

we were able to become.

I want a pocketbook of Sapphic fragments,

gold edges, the cover a soft azure.

I want to take her with me.