Poet Tree

In our final look at Sappho, we see her reflect on her life and legacy. Conventional scholarship did not prepare me for how sad these fragme...

Another side of Sappho can be seen in her biting social commentary, which has come through only in small gnomic utterances. While fewer in n...

The ['s and ]'s in the original Aeolic Greek below represent gaps of indeterminate length in the physical papyrus that can't be ...

In this set of mostly destroyed fragments Sappho speaks for a culture where sexual conduct, ritual preparation and poetic receptivity are in...

Truth is often stranger than fiction: it would not seem logical that the model for the Cinderella story would be a fellow slave with Aesop, ...

These four fragments (along with 94 , 95 , 96 and 98 ) are almost certainly all that is left of a book of Sappho’s poetry (one of nine) los...

Ah the memory it always lurks Like a distant fountain, experience re-lived, The twinge at how the linens should be folded, That elbow grease...

It's the old vaudeville man and wife Horse suit costume routine I know, Show and tell at the ranch, with the two Horse brains on display...

Careful sound-by-sound, word-by-word translation of the mysterious fragments yields more mystery. Not even One gleam I deem Facing upon Radi...

Some archaic ritual fragments that reveal some modern personal truths. Can't will Can't fill Entirely Though I would Flash my lampma...

Unlike Sappho 3's private meditation, this fragment places her within a ritual circle, in a song for public performance on the right ord...

This obscure Sappho fragment is a strikingly modern lyric on a timely topic, fame. Would give Reknown -- Elite elevation -- To my one. Hubri...

Certain Sappho fragments are sound evocations for mystery school ritual practices. Here are a few of the chants. As background, Khaireto = G...

Left my taxes at the tack store With my purple eyeglasses -- Another day older, I suppose. There's been so much of late to contemplate, ...

Say a little prayer for the adventure we concocted For ourselves on the fly. The tragedy unfolded On golden days, with calla lilies and oxyg...

Sappho is perhaps best known for her "erotic" fragments, which seem to have burned through the now-marred papyrus. The feeling has...

This long but heavily effaced fragment records the coherence of an historically important, divinely ordained wedding, giving maximal lyric i...

Names were more than labels in 7th-century BCE Greece; they were "instruction manuals" for a child's desired qualities. Sappho...

The surfers of Encinitas loll like seals on their Ghosts As the channelers look out to sea like fisherman’s wives, The endless horizon ever ...

Pumping gas by the Ali Baba motel When the world has changed: We know now the photos of the earth Are faked, the wars are agit-prop, The peo...

Jesus dying is now dead — It is done — The drone of air siren Nuclear holocaust alarm And the afternoon Can proceed Now that the belief slat...

We’re accustomed to believe spiritual power is vested in objects: the lucky rabbit’s foot, the Roman cross that transformed ego death into a...

Purple has always been the color of enlightenment and the enlightened ones. It is Aphrodite's color and the Greek mystery religion culti...

More repackaging of fragments a la a philologist, this time with a recurring theme of Adonis, the doomed mortal who became Aphrodite's l...

A nice Veneralia surprise for me that fragment 2 is in Sapphic stanzas and is about my favorite subject, the divine feminine. Diffuse here f...

I took the conventional road of seeing the scraps of Sappho's Epithalamia as separate expressions, only to find out it's all one coh...

The tack rooms are deserted, A red woodpecker sings Clinging to the pole As the silence grows loud. There is always room for a solo voice Wh...

I light the sage And literally create God in the sky,  Real only in my belief --  That's the revolution, The real altar of belief, The t...

As I explore these Sapphic fragments I notice they are not broken things at all but concentrated. Emotion lives on in words that demand rele...

Modern translations of Sappho can probably be summed up by how Ezra Pound famously or infamously translated or violated only the first three...

There are break-up poems and there's this Sappho break-up poem, still next-level despite inventing the genre. The papyrus has lost much ...

Hat tip Dionysus of Halicarnassus for allowing us to read the one remaining complete poem of Sappho. On rainbow throne hear my plea Aphrodit...