"I desire; and I crave....You put me on fire." ~ Sappho
Born into an aristocratic family on the Greek island of Lesbos in 615 B.C., Sappho devoted her life to the cult of Aphrodite. She was an academician and acclaimed poet; and we don't know too much else about her, in part because Pope Gregory himself burned her work for its "licentiousness" in 1073. One 28 line poem and some tantalizing fragments survived.
My mother taught me her love of poetry but she never mentioned Sappho. That one I found on my own. I do credit Mama for setting me on the poetry path. As a tot, I could recite the entirety of "The Charge of the Light Brigade" by Lord Alfred Tennyson. "Into the valley of death rode the six hundred...Theirs was not to make reply...Theirs was not to question why...Theirs but to do or die." Heavy stuff for a wee child not yet in kindergarten.
But Mama loved many poets, for example, the sentimental Southerner Sidney Lanier, the Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes and others, including, of course, Emily Dickinson, the favorite poet of WASP ladies of my mother's generation. When she died, we laid her to rest on a hilltop in a country cemetery with a simple graveside service, all poems, no prayers or eulogy. My paranoid schizophrenic niece Barbie, long off her meds, head shaven for the occasion, stood at the head of the casket and held a bouquet of birthday balloons. All things considered, it was a rather uneventful funeral for my family though the minister recruited by my late sister Ellen to offer a benediction was freaked.
(My father who preceded her in death chose cremation. I shall never forget our small family standing in the columbarium as an attendant climbed a ladder to place his urn in what looked like a mailbox--and paused to tell us: "There are three more openings for family members up here if anyone is interested." Another niece, Beth, almost knocked the ladder down in her haste to drag her new, fourth or fifth?, husband out because she thought he was looking at me.)
But I digress. We began Mama's service with Dickinson's "Because I Could Not Stop For Death" (He kindly stopped for me; The carriage held but just ourselves; and immortality.") And we ended with the ubiquitous "Do Not Weep For Me" generally attributed to Mary Frye, circa 1932. Barbie left the balloons at the graveside; and Ellen and I returned at nightfall to stash them in the trunk of her car.
Mama, on Easter Sunday, I remember sitting on your lap and listening to you read the poems you loved.
I do not stand at your grave and weep; you are not there; you did not die.
