Sappho Wrote about Twelve Thousand Lines of Poetry

Sappho Wrote about Twelve Thousand Lines of Poetry

Twelve thousands lines of poetry were torched

By time and Christians.  Piety increased

The ravages, all this because she scorched

With love for girls.  Bishops made a feast

Of male disgust that Sappho caused by fire

In veins for younger women.  Holy men

Destroyed her verses making them a pyre

Of beauty and destruction, one.  Her pen

Outdid there sanctimony.  No one knows

Who all the Christians were.  They disappeared

In something less than dust.  Their sacred prose

Has been erased, clean as a shaved off beard.

..The few, those flaming stanzas that survive,

….Have kept her and her singing love alive.