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a woman alone
poems/Janet Mason

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(Cycladic Press $6 -- ISBN/ 1-882827-08-2)

I wrote these poems while traveling alone through Greece--in Athens, Delphi and the islands of Crete and Lesvos. My two main inspirations were Sappho and Odyseus Elytis, their slim volumes tucked in my back pack.

a woman alone
stands outside
washed white houses:
she is cut
into cliff; the trellises
of her roses
bloom geraniums
that inhale
as she walks by;
a woman alone
is her own
scent unfolding.

a woman alone
hears the cooing of pigeons
and the flap of wings
folding air;
she hears Cathedral bells
answering one another;
and morning light
sputtering traffic
into existence; a
woman alone is a city
awakening.

she colors her own fields
wide open with purple
and yellow bowing
to a prism of green
swept away
in a stampede
of poppies
a woman alone is
wild and red.

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click here to read commentary about Sappho in Lesbos, Greece

she is chiseled
from stone;
raising her arms
her breasts
become
small and high,
hungry
for their own kind;
a woman alone
inhabits
the sinew
of white marble

a woman alone lives
in the house
of the double ax;
she enters her own labyrinth
and comes out amazed;
she is the minotaur
the earth womb
turned to a monster;
she is her own silver thread
leading herself to the center
of the maze that is her,
a woman alone.