About suffering they were never wrong,
those poets of old, masters
of the quill. How intensely they understood
the human condition towards conformity,
hexameters, spondee after dactyl, anceps to wrap up the mind
neatly. Sphragis for a ribbon tied round. We still love praising
ourselves.
And how much they thought of
women, it seems, with distorted faces towards empty seas,
deserted shores and wretched kin. Lion-hearted and spouted
from Scylla and Charybdis and howling for pity,
miserere nobis was their cry, if you could manage to feel any
pity for an artificial plurality. Women were not rules,
they were the exception, the bastardised, the barbarianised,
othered even still on a funeral pyre.
Burning burning burning burning.
Betray a brother and you shall have no fleece to keep you warm.
Beating of breasts and ripping of hair, a mother’s cry can set a whole town
alight. It can end a whole Book of strife.
Masters know how to observe art. A Bacchant Brawl.
Poets can pile on detail, loosening of dress, fleck in cheek, gloss of eye, but they cannot forget
that women must sacrifice, must suffer. And we must feel for them, when no one else
does — immemor are those men, mindful are we.
You, you! they can cry, perfide! in desperation, rage, sorrow, in letters, laments, accusations, but
recusatio and rhetoric will not help them,
when their girlish feet get stuck in the sand.
Kiana Rezakhanlou is an Upper 6 student from London, hoping to embark on the next stage of her academic journey at Oxford University, come October, whether by Zoom or amidst the colleges themselves. She is interested in all things linguistic, literary, classical and philological, and can often be found waxing lyrical about the poets Goethe or Ovid, sometimes within one sentence of each other.