Silent Wisdom (Loose Sapphics) in The Poetic Round Forum

For years I believed in all those endless lies
of how I should feel and where my heart belonged
and who I could love and worse who I could not
I believed it all.

Those written words that set down the rules that say
with no reason why I could never belong
and why my true loving was always a crime
as I chose to be.

I hid from the voices taunting innuendos
obscure double meanings in degrading names
shame tarnished emotions without compassion
I knew no one cared.

Then Sappho spoke silently in fragments of
verse gently taking my hand to walk proudly
in her path with my head held high no tears left
but still I could cry.

They who denied me love could not understand
my desires to feel love that’s right for my heart
instead of the lies that imprison the soul
now I understand.

How can my love be thought as unnatural
when it was created before I was born
my Sapphic heart pulsed free in my mother’s womb
so I could know love.

How could I tell them the truth deep within me
and break their dreams of tradition, a daughter
insecure in her womanhood feeling lost
in society.

Restrained in the bondage of gender
a binary so unnatural, so wrong
I could not, maybe should not even exist
they called my mind – sick.

But I am not ill but the social dictate
that breeds hatred for what I am born to be
is plagued by a disease of unwholesome spite
and is mankind’s shame.


© J Farmer 2013
Silent Wisdom (Loose Sapphics) in The Poetic Round Forum