Desire to be the middle of
like the hyacinth in the mountains

(flower formed from spilled
blood)

that shepherd men with their feet
trample down, mindless of

and on the (ground) these Zephyr-blown
stars rinsing the field

purple-flowered jewel —
lived life

burns the skin.

 

Sappho [fragment 105B]

 

[Alyson Shore Adler is a clinical social worker in private practice in Narberth, Pennsylvania. Her poems have been published in Passager. This poem is from her unpublished chapbook Light / Air / A Plucked String, a collection of poems composed in collaboration with Sappho fragments from Anne Carson’s translation, If Not Winter.]