Kleopatra Fantasia

 

 

Kleopatra Fantasia 

 

 

 

 

Cleopatra rides the rails

but never the bus

a foreigner now 

as she was in Caesar's city,

workmen shifting her from station

to museum, crated like so many

cans of beans.

She is silent as sand,

stilled limbs leafed in gold, a

treasure always in transit though

black as bitumen now, cat eyes

blind in an empty skull,

everything drawn out

but her dry heart.

She was bread once

and a circus too, lithe

as a lotus stem snaking up

to lay its white flower

on the cheek of Lake Mareotis,

rippling like a pneuma of rain

through the changing houses of Ptah.

Her tongue danced to a dozen

languages. Her mind was a library

of betrayals, each volume a loss

to Alexander's insane epigoni.

Her future was scribed from
the Books of Breathing and

ambition's killing text:

 

Caesar's smooth hand 

and Antony's sparking eye,

a brief breath of kingdoms, twins

of the sun and moon, all a mirage-

shimmer bright as sanctuary

whose telos was only vast silence 

 

flowing from

the open mouth of an asp.

 

 

 

October 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 posted for

Word Garden Word List

 

 

 

 and also linked at

earthweal for Open Link #139

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

epigone; plural noun: epigones; plural noun: epigoni

a less distinguished follower or imitator of someone...

 

Books of Breathing: late Egyptian funerary texts simplified from the Book of the Dead

 

Notes: Cleopatra does not ride rails or frequent museums, as her body has never been found, tho a tomb has recently been postulated north of her capitol city Alexandria at Abusir, near what was once Lake Mareotis (Mariout or Maryut in modern Arabic.)

In the Egyptian process of mummification, all internal organs were removed except the heart, which was considered the seat of thought and identity.

 

The Ptolemaic pharaohs of Egypt, of which Cleopatra was the last, were crowned by the High Priest of Ptah, (creator god who made the world through the power of speech) at his temple in Memphis. They were more Greek than Egyptian, descendants of a general of Alexander the Great after his conquest there, and Cleopatra was the first and only one to learn the Egyptian language. According to Plutarch, she was fluent as well in Greek, Ethiopian, Hebrew, Arabic, Syrian, Median, Parthian, and Latin.

 

Cleopatra had four known children, including twins with Mark Antony, Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene.

 

The endless list of wars and civil wars which Cleopatra was directly involved in over the tumultuous course of her 39 years is too long to begin to reprise here, but you can read about them and what is known of her complex life in detail here on wikipedia

 

 

Images:A posthumous painted portrait of Cleopatra VII of Ptolemaic Egypt from Roman Herculaneum, made during the 1st century AD source here 

A raised relief depiction of a woman dated to the early 1st century AD and thought to depict Cleopatra or Cleopatra Selene II, Queen of Mauretania, daughter of Cleopatra VII of Egypt and Mark Antony. source here

Belated Friday Flash 55 for September 2020

 

 

 

Welcome, all, if somewhat belatedly, to the Friday 55 for September, 2020. Apologies for the late post, but since last week, things at my place have been disrupted by plumbing emergencies, brick masons and the unpleasant necessity of allowing workmen into my home when my state is 5th in the nation for COVID positivity, creating a very expensive and stressful chaos to match the larger chaos around us. But the 55 must go on, and I know everyone has a great deal on his or her plate right now, what with the fiasco of a debate, the rise of an old/new racist fascism and various other things, like the plague mounting to over 200,000 deaths in the U.S, and our West Coast burning to a cinder. I hope as writers we can use this exercise to some purpose, either to exorcise, excoriate, or escape. 

That said, the rules remain the same. Write a poem, piece of prose poetry or flash fiction on any topic, so long as it is in 55 words, no more, no less, and post a link in the comments below. The meme will be live from Thursday at midnight to Sunday at 4 pm CST.

 

~*~

 

Once again, I've chosen to escape to the world of dreams in my 55.

 

 

Green Snake

 

Spirits reach for me

but no owls come,

only the smallest snake

curled as a vine tendril,

the jade of an early apple,

sleeping on my pillow.

 

You 

send your fetch

to curse my hearth

ashen grey with death

but the snake slithers me 

to cover where

morning kisses water,

where you have

no power. 

October 2020

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images: Bullsnake,  author unknown, Fair Use

Viking Cemetery, Färjas, Sweden   author unknown, Fair Use

 

Gone Away Monday

Gone Away Monday

Does Easter Monday have a name;

of the rolled stone, the fleshless breath of bone, the

hollow's voiceless void; the comfort of a sobriquet, 

a calendar law of foreign Palms or dreadful Goods,

to mark the thing it's not?

The steam, the mayfly dew, the hope, the striking snake

that rises only shimmers happy cataracts 

to disappear; a lie preserved in

language of dead seeds, amber silo filled with

miracles' weeds,

of a cloud we

would become and cannot be, a flame burnt out

we barely know we see.

 

 April 2020

 for Kerry's April wordlist #13: lie

and Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads

Play it Again Day 13 Thirteen is Poetry

(the 13 words: disappear flesh bones voice dreadful

away dead law happy comfort amber miracle flies)

Images: Cave Dwellings near Sperlingua, Sicily, 1933 © M.C. Escher  Fair Use

The Cave, 1901, by Clarence White   Public Domain

Badlands

Badlands

I went to sleep

in the cotton rows

child's hands raw,

belly empty as

my mother's brown eyes

 that hot day she left me

alone by the river mud's soft folded stink.

I cracked my lids

in the hard nitre'd bed where

time cries out loud in the torture of change,

where rain becomes air

on dry roserock hills, deep in the gulch

where the snake promised water

and had nothing but dust

visions without sight,

day without night. I was small as

the sand when I rose up again

on the last thermal's wings,

on the story of gulls, on the wild windy

ballad the dark singer sang

to the tide in my bones.

January 2020

posted for earthweal's weekly challenge,

 Water

Process note: I've tried to present here the transition from the presence of water, to its absence. The bottom photo is of natural geologic erosion in the Borrego Badlands of California, and the top, work in the cotton fields possibly in Oklahoma(?) around the turn of the century.* This poem tries to bridge the gap between, for what are fields now may in the future become the desert landscape, moonlike and barren, that the climate has made of the badlands, which extend over much of the western part of the US, from New Mexico to California.

Header Image, *Picking cotton, author, location and date unknown, from an Oklahoma heritage FB site, public domain (the people on this site discussed their memories of grandparents or parents hand-working the cotton fields in Oklahoma as children. Oklahoma still grows cotton and was the fourth largest producer in the US, according to this 2017 report. )

Footer Image: Borrego Badlands, California USA, author unknown, Fair Use.

Mistakes

Mistakes

Dark flutters

words melted like butter

burn the tongue, her hand on your shoulder 

on a night from which every dream has been wrung

I looked for your face but it was wrong,

wrong for me to come here

with my snakes

wrapped around

the sad mistakes truth makes.

posted for   real toads

Challenge: Micropoetry

Note: This is a triquain, (a seven line poem with syllables of 3-6-9-12-9-6-3) to which I have arbitrarily added a final couplet (3-6.)

Optional Musical Accompaniment

Image: author and title unknown, fair use via the internet.
No copyright infringement intended.

Dreaming: The Snake Act

Dreaming: The Snake Act

It was a day in spring

or the fullness of summer

or a twilight in September

when you took the slug from the rose

and set it on my hand.

 I didn't know that slugs

could bite, but so it was.

While the wind played like pipes

you pulled the green end--so thick so pale--

of the suckering vine from its high dark place

 in the eaves, disappeared in leaves.

It fell for hours, in sweet hissing coils

 til you cracked it like a whip and it

flashed its rainbow fangs.

Then, you gave my snakeskin secrets

to your Kardashian-assed boss

with her eyes white as vodka;

'It's all over,' you said,

as I felt the sickly flush of

being taken for a fool

yet again.

So I took a bus to California

to work the arcades

with Manny and the Batgirl

but on Sundays

I always go down

by the old river graveyard

to water the parched pots

and feed the snakes,

because I still

remember

us.

~December 2015

posted for     real toads

The Tuesday Platform

Images: Bullsnake wallpaper, via google image search

The Organic Kingdom, by Wojciek Siudmak. Fair use via wikiart.org

Snake Eye

Snake Eye

Your eye, that reptile jewel hung yellow as

a sunken sun, your talk a

cloudy snakeskin strung with pierced pendant hearts--when

it  passed idly over me, measuring

and rejecting

the price of that collecting, you

almost said

 you loved me, but remembered

a lie will cause a reckoning more

 often than it saves one.

~January 2015 

















Optional Musical Accompaniment

posted for    real toads

Weekend Challenge: Flash 55 Plus

Kerry once again brings us the 55 meme,  and her optional Plus this time is to write it in the form of a Herrick Stanza (word count 8-6-8-6-2-6-2-5-7-5.) This made for some weird enjambment, but I kind of like it this way.

Image: The Eye of  A Green Tree Python, copyright Joel Satore
Source