Theme

First love

Before one has learned what the words will cost.

• Zhou China

  Ospreys

  Water, birds, a modest woman, longing. Later readers made a moral of proper marriage. The poem itself keeps fishing in the stream.

• Archaic Greece

  Equal to the Gods

  On Lesbos a speaker watches a man sitting opposite the beloved. The body undoes itself: tongue, fire, ears, sweat. The Greek survives. A complete letter does not.

• Heian Japan

  The Woman in the Deutzia Month

  Heian-kyō, 1003. A court woman writes of a prince in the third person, as if the life were already a tale. Waka go back and forth. The prince’s wife leaves. Moonlight is not the whole weather.

• Sangam Tamilakam

  Red Earth and Pouring Rain

  In classical Tamil, love has landscapes. A woman asks what kin her family was to his, then answers with monsoon and red soil. The poem is not anonymous India. It is akam, and it is Tamil.

• New Kingdom Egypt

  Sister Without Rival

  On the back of a New Kingdom roll now in Dublin, a young man and a young woman take turns. They call each other brother and sister. They mean lovers.

• Lyon, French Renaissance

  Kiss Me Again

  Œuvres de Louïze Labé Lionnoize: sonnets, including “Baise m’encor.” The mouth on the page is certain. Whether one woman of Lyon wrote it is a living scholarly question. The poems survive either way.