So Sappho Wrote Poem by gershon hepner

“Like a windstorm, punishing the oaks,
love shakes my heart.” So Sappho wrote.
Like ridicule in priest and rabbi jokes
which I do not propose to quote,
some laugh about the love she could evoke,
because it is as wild and free,
as, on the shapely shores of Ocracoke,
wild ponies galloping to sea.

Inspired by an article by Holland Cotter reviewing an exhibition, “Worshipping Women: Ritual and Reality in Classical Athens, ” at the Onassis Cultural Center,645 Fifth Avenue (“Greek Glory, Female Perspective, ” NYT, December 19,2008) :
Athena comes on as a striding warrior goddess, armed and dangerous, avid as a wasp, in a tiny bronze statuette from the fifth century B.C. This is the goddess who, in “The Iliad, ” egged the Greeks on and manipulated their victory against Troy, and the one who later became the spiritual chief executive of the Athenian military economy. Yet seen painted in silhouette on a black vase, she conveys a different disposition. She’s still in armor but stands at ease, a stylus poised in one hand, a writing tablet open like a laptop in the other. The goddess of wisdom is checking her mail, and patiently answering each plea and complaint. Artemis is equally complex. A committed virgin, she took on the special assignment of protecting pregnant women and keeping an eye on children, whose carved portraits filled her shrines. She was a wild-game hunter, but one with a deep Franciscan streak. In one image she lets her hounds loose on deer; in another she cradles a fawn. But no sooner have we pegged her as the outdoorsy type than she changes. On a gold-hued vase from the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg she appears as Princess Diana, to use her Roman name, crowned and bejeweled in a pleated floor-length gown. Demeter was worshiped as an earth goddess long before she became an Olympian. Her mystery cult had female priests, women-only rites and a direct line to the underworld. And although you might not expect Aphrodite, paragon of physical beauty, to have a dark side, she does. She was much adored; there were shrines to her everywhere. And she had the added advantage of being exotic: she seems to have drifted in from somewhere far east of Greece, bringing a swarm of nude winged urchins with her. But as goddess of love she was unreliable, sometimes perverse. Yes, she brings people amorously together, but when things go wrong, watch out:
“Like a windstorm/Punishing the oak trees, /Love shakes my heart.”
So wrote the poet and worshiper of women, Sappho, who knew.

12/19/08