Sappho and Lesbian Sex
Films for Men to Perv Over
“And when we come across the ‘I’ in early poetry . . .
we have to read that pronoun warily. What the ‘I’ says
belongs to the performer [means what the performer
wants it to be]; it may have been factually true for the
author, but we err if we invest it with a modern
subjectivity or assume that it expresses an essentially
lyric sensibility. The lyric may well be as conventional,
as dictated and derived, as the epic.”
~ Michael Schmidt, The First Poets, 10
A woman sings of love, of love well-known
Inside her, secretly. Convention in
Her era means her singing can condone
Forbidden fires if she pretends the sin
She turns to the conflagration in the veins
Supposedly is in a male’s soft throat.
She sings as if the voice’s love-torn strains
Are from a man whose pulsing passions bloat
Up like his desperate pounding member. She
Performs a masculine desire, the “I”
As straight and strong as masculinity.
It feels more like an oceanic sky.
..Or . . . woman with a woman makes a pyre
….To stoke the men with panicky desire.