PSAPPHO: it is how Sappho spelled her name before driven out by male egos from her birthplace in Greece.
*‘now she stands out among Lydian women as after sunset the rose-fingered moon exceeds all stars’: From fragment 96 of Sappho’s lyric poetry.
Ares embodies the physical valour necessary for success in war but can also personify sheer brutality and bloodlust.
My poem is not only a lament, but a threnody of resistance in Sapphic stanzas. Ending each stanza with a spondee, gives it the same emphatic closure that ancient threnodies carried in ritual chant.
Sapphic stanza – named for Sappho:
3 lines of: /*/* /** /*/* [11 syllables]
The final Adonic line (L4): /**// [5 syllables]
Originally her stanza was unrhymed, but during the Middle Ages it adapted a rhyme scheme of abab.
