“Sappho in Exile” by Karin Cope
Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Sappho in Exile” by Karin Cope.
#sapphoinsicilia
By Karin Cope
I catch her waiting by the window in the wind.
In the distance, ships ferry fuel to ancient ports.
Lizards scatter as we pass the temple gates, afternoon shadows onrushing before us.
She sits on a broken column beneath bitter olives wishing that
the scattered light was icy water silvering her toes.
Sappho bends down to tighten her sandal strap,
plucks broken glass and bottle caps from the dust.
Her dog pants quietly in the shade, dreams of tracking rabbits in the snow.
At night, when the cars fall silent, birds begin to sing.
Once perhaps the sea was nearer to this gate. It will be again.
Here is how the Italians wish you good fortune—in bocca al lupo—
by putting you in the wolf’s mouth.
Etna’s ash lies like a shadow on the streets of Catania, gathers at the corners,
sifts through the slats of every bench.
In the morning she wades along the sandy strand;
afternoons she rests on a cobble beach and dreams of home.
Once she wandered where lemons and pomegranates ripened—
these days rows of plastic rustle in the wind.
Every morning she wakes to the smell of burning. Smoke fills the air.
This is the world now and there is no other one.
Copyright © Karin Cope
Karin Cope is a queer Nova Scotia based poet, professor, activist and visual artist who has logged long periods at sea with her partner, Marike Finlay, conducting collaborative research and developing poetic, scholarly and socially engaged bodies of work in remote coastal communities in Mexico and Central America, Atlantic Canada, British Columbia, Alaska and the Mediterranean. Cope’s book-length publications include Passionate Collaborations: Learning to Live with Gertrude Stein, a playful and scholarly investigation into the queer life and works of a modernist icon; What we’re doing to stay afloat, a collection of lyric poems that takes aim at the politics of austerity in remote and rural coastal regions; and since 2009, a blog at visiblepoetry.ca dedicated to exploring poetic relationships between visual and verbal media. Associate Professor and Chair of Art History and Contemporary Culture at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Cope is currently at work on a new sea-going poetry project tracking several histories of migrant movements in the Mediterranean, entitled If Sappho were a sailor.
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