Sierra Nelson: “We’ll Always Have Carthage”
This month, sent from one of the round earth’s imagined corners, a poem by Sierra Nelson, who writes that “‘We’ll Always Have Carthage’ was inspired in part by images from Virgil’s The Aeneid. In that epic poem, the hero Aeneas and his battered fleet take shelter in Carthage, and Aeneas begins a romance with the Carthaginian Queen, Dido. He stays happily with her, helping her efforts to rebuild her city, but when the god Mercury comes to Aeneas to remind him of his destiny elsewhere, the hero decides to slip away in the middle of the night. Dido catches on to the plan and confronts him, but chooses not to detain him or harm his ships, although at certain points it crosses her mind. Instead she builds a large funeral pyre for herself, a conflagration Aeneas and his men see as they are sailing away. This poem isn’t meant to retell that story, but does resonate with some of its tone and imagery, especially as imagined from Dido’s perspective. The image of the lion’s skin was inspired by classic Greek and Roman sculptures of the brutish heroic figure Hercules, often depicted wearing a lion’s skin as a cape, complete with the lion’s mouth open over the hero’s head as a kind of hood.”
We’ll Always Have Carthage
The head must bow to the heart,
which is why I always look down;
if the earth is round and round
I’ll be wrong until the ends of it.
Beautiful, you said, and meant
the sea. Reminding me –
there are walls to be built,
rocks carried.
Now I can’t meet you
or your eyes – just the boats
below in the harbor,
burning.
The wind shakes the earth
from its four corners;
the flames are picking up,
or is that me shaking?
Look, I’m right – the sun is underwater.
Now get out of here with that lion’s skin
on your back.
—
SIERRA NELSON is a co-founder of literary performance groups The Typing Explosion and the Vis-à-Vis Society. Her work can be found in Forklift, Ohio; Thermos; Diagram; Fairy Tale Review; and other locations. She currently guest writes for Kenyon Review’s blog, and her chapbook with artist Loren Erdrich is forthcoming.
“We’ll Always Have Carthage” appears in Poetry Northwest Spring/Summer 2010 (v5.n1).
couple years ago ~ a poem Sam saw when he rode the #120 downtown:
Your eyes are closed but you aren’t dreaming
You are traveling slowly
Like a giant shipwreck still sailing
Most tenderly, the sun puts a hand to your forehead
Yes, you think, I’ve been unwell
You sink into the feeling
But the sun is blind and must touch everything
Always feeling it’s gold way forward towards the dark
Sierra Nelson
——————————————————
and replied:
Serendipity
not thinking about it
though feeling it, yes
even my eyes are closed
I’m not looking for it
yet Sierra knows
her poem is right here
for all hearts mending
your poem’s on my bus, Sierra
and you wrote it from my Self
to me
Sam Love
I have no idea how this works? If you could get my message, my ‘reply’ poem to Sierra, I would appreciate it because her poem ‘Your Eyes Are Closed…’ saved me much anguish and heartbreak and ‘who knows how many more tears?’ a couple or few? years back. I found her and ‘this’ by ‘googling’ her name ~ and this is my only way to say, “THANK YOU, Sierra!”
thank YOU, PNW !!!