A poem about the tragic story of Dido, Queen of Carthage.
Dido and Aeneas share a passionate affair after Aeneas’s shipwreck, but must part as Aeneas is fated to found Rome, leading Dido to suicide in heartbreak and rage. Her sister encourages the match for Carthage’s benefit, and the affair is consummated in a cave, but Jupiter sends Mercury to remind Aeneas of his divine mission, forcing him to abandon Dido, who then takes her own life.
Amor sibi nascitur
She held the other as an altar to herself,
hands twisted around his absence,
measuring it as though it were his love.
Her city ascended into gloom,
murus upon murus,
streets folding around a reclusive flame,
a town's heart, held in cupped hands.
Each pulse she offered
was a tally,
each gaze a attestation,
each word a confine
drawn upon the pulpy tissue of yearning.
The beloved became horizon,
a mirror for her gravity,
never companion,
never refuge,
only witness to the enormity of her desire.
Even tenderness arrived, honed to a fine edge,
insisting on reciprocation
or abandoning a landscape of wreckage in its retreat.
Et cum absentia venit,
as inevitable as the lights succumbence to the dark
her city memorized its own void,
lit the flame
to burn itself alone.
She did not know love
Her soul was a bottomless vessel,
brimming yet hollow,
the hunger that forges worlds
and splinters hearts,
the flame that will not share.
Some loves fail not by the hand of
betrayal,
but because they were never vast
enough
to breathe the air of freedom and destiny.
Dido, you never could welcome Aeneas'
prophecy;
you were no lover,
you were merely enraptured by the reflection
of your own longing.
Presence is a garden that withers
in the stranglehold of a selfish thirst.
Amor vere purum
remains unwonted,
requiring a hand open enough
to hold the blade by the edge without drawing blood,
to be the fire that ignites the world without a path of ash.
-AT