stuffing
Kim Roberts
“Underneath the breast all my heart is shaken”
—Sappho
The gift was not the mummies. Hundreds
of mummified crocodiles dug up in 1900,
from the ruins of ancient Oxyrhynchus.
The gift was not the mummies, but their stuffing.
Out of their mouths came blackened scraps
of papyrus. In Egypt, 56 fragments of poems
by Sappho were discovered. They unfurled
in pieces, still legible tatters. Words
of ardor written among olive groves
disengorged from double ranks
of serrated teeth. Despite dessication, despite travel
across deserts of time. The layers of words
came unglued, still sharp, set loose like breezes
through myrtle leaves, like the echo
of incoming tides tonguing the tender shore.
Kim Roberts is the author of six books of poems, most recently Corona/Crown, a cross-disciplinary collaboration with photographer Robert Revere (WordTech Editions, 2023). Roberts edited By Broad Potomac’s Shore: Great Poems from the Early Days of our Nation’s Capital (University of Virginia Press, 2020), selected by the East Coast Centers for the Book to represent Washington, DC in the Route 1 Reads program. She is the author of the popular guidebook, A Literary Guide to Washington, DC: Walking in the Footsteps of American Writers from Francis Scott Key to Zora Neale Hurston (University of Virginia Press, 2018). Roberts co-curates DC Pride Poem-a-Day each June with filmmaker Jon Gann. http://www.kimroberts.org