SAPPHO’S FLIGHT
(a cheeky chant for zombies)
Nobody uses the stropha Sapphica any more,
not even Jacek Dehnel or Różycki,
why do they choose sonnets, when the Sapphic
stanza is sexy?
Top hat, bowler, have more grace?
A pointless hard-on, needless fart and cock in hand
belonging to a dull classicist in the 20th century
and the first, if you like.
Sooner the avant-garde will retrieve the crushed
remains of Sappho from her resting rocks,
dear artistes! Dress the bells,
perhaps you’ll get it up!
- - — - - - -
It’s possible that the
day will not pass into
the annals of fate,
when Sappho sleeps –
– shot down siren -
eyes gawping
from sub-sea ridges
among lobsters and coral,
seducing stingrays,
when fair students
can’t even remember
the names of lovers
their mistress had,
she can shut
her lips and keep shtum,
and not hurt
her alphabet
with hollow ambition.
- – – - – - - – - -
Madness is here! Oh yes!
To fly like a bird
from the rock to the peak –
– the rock buried in the neck!
- - - – - - ——– - – - -
How to calculate the rush of wind in the hair
when soaring on a prayer,
Evenly from the cliff’s peak;
Will the antique mask turn out so slick?
In such flight this anti-term
is surprised to learn
the male rhyme gripped by
the balls, and it is the profound, the female
A profound feminine death, as in Wojaczek
who was brave enough to rhyme
so as to mix most every time
though neither fish nor fowl, a shitty hatchet
Won’t match the massacre, guts; carcass
now the Sapphos rise
phrases terrorise
Zombies laughing hard, about us,
because:
- – - – — — – - – - - – –
Best in all the world is a thirteen syllable line,
Best in all the world is love in a hole,
Worst in all the world is a gold plated cluster seed,
Worst in all the world is a bent bike pedal,
Freshest in all the world is Tadeusz Różewicz,
Freshest in all the world is Ingeborg Bachmann,
The mind needs every single particle,
though in the fist the weakest sings the cuticle;
Particle toasts from early morn’
the words of Emil Cioran.
If Cioran were to frame Sappho’s flight:
Sappho soars through the Mongol heart
killing the Khan’s ride with a dart
In the night.
If the zombies were to return whence they came from
All classical sorrows would be gone
fresh air by process of simple advection
in Sappho’s direction:
(what use are eight syllable lines,
an eleven syllable line
is what I pine
for at this fucking time)
are strophoids not better
mutants by Homeric letter
from the Iliad of dreams
full of rhymes bursting at the seams?
It’s me, Sappho, flying and
thinking! How to think: being,
well masculine. Expose the sharpened teeth?
Is this flight into the sea a dream?
- – — - – - - - – -
Icarus can jump, as far as I am concerned
with his fall into the seas.
His flight was no ballsy decision.
Not a shadow of passion in the man.
THE END!
from R Rybicki’s new collection LOGORYTM
