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Literary Nook
June is LGBTQ+ Pride month
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Posted on Jun 22 2023
The letter “L” at the beginning of LGBTQ+ stands for lesbian. Sappho (630 – 570 BC) was a Greek poetess from the island of of Lesbos. Beyond her poetry she is well known as symbol of love and desire between women. The words “Sapphic” and “lesbian” derive from her name and place of birth.
Here are poems by American lesbian poets. Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) was U.S. Poet Laureate from 1949 to 1950. Kay Ryan was born in 1945 and served as the U.S. Poet Laureate from 2008-2010.
I highly recommend that readers look up Bishop’s poem The Fish, which is too long to publish here. Bishop’s poems have inspired me to write several sonnets.
I heard Kay Ryan read her poems to a packed auditorium in Las Vegas while I lived there. She spoke eloquently of the recent loss of her partner.
Both were community college teachers.
I chose poems dealing with the ocean to share here in the CNMI.
The Wave
(Written by Elizabeth Bishop when she was 18 years old, 1929)
A shining wave
Fills all the skies
Bright shadows float
Across the land.
See, crystal clear,
Its helmet rise!
And now the motion
Of a hand,
A tiny quickening
Of the heart,
And it will fall
And nothing more
Can keep the sea and land apart.
How still, how blinding is the light!
Spellbound and golden shines the foam.
Without a gesture
Or a word
It cannot break;
The wing must turn, and nest again
The radiant bird,
The wave, the wonder, go back home.
We do not move,
We do not flee,
We see it shudder, lightning bright,
And dully double
On the sea
We are too innocent and wise,
We laugh into each other’s eyes.
Chop
By Kay Ryan
The bird walks down the beach along the glazed edge
The last wave reached. His each step makes a perfect stamp –
smallish, but as sharp as an emperor’s chop. Stride, stride,
goes the emperor down his wide mirrored promenade
the sea bows to repolish.
Shark’s Teeth
By Kay Ryan, 2005
Everything contains some silence. Noise gets its zest from
the small shark’s-tooth shaped fragments of rest angled in it.
An hour of city holds maybe a minute of these remnants of
a time when silence reigned, compact and dangerous as a shark.
Sometimes a bit of tail or fin can still be sensed in parks.
