Lesbian Love Poems

GILLIAN SPRAGGS, EDITOR

love shook my senses

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I was sixteen when I first read this fragment of a lost love poem, composed by Sappho more than two and a half millennia ago. The image shook me with immediate recognition. Love - eros - sexual passion - that compelling force that comes, apparently, from out of the blue and shakes us to our roots - at that time I was just beginning to know its power.

Traditionally, when passion, or grief, or intense joy disturb the settled patterns of our lives, we turn to poetry – our own, or other people’s. We look for words to give a voice to what cries out, unvoiced, within us. With words, we rebuild our disrupted sense of who we are to accommodate a new understanding. Sometimes, if it is passion that has taken hold of us, we feel impelled to construct the beloved in words. It is a way of making love – of taking possession, and also of paying due tribute.

For those of us who are lesbians, this engagement with language has been particularly tricky to negotiate. For us, the disruptive impact of sexual passion is likely to be fiercer, separating us out from family and friends, alienating us from whole areas of cultural tradition. There are old prohibitions on our speech, weaker now than they once were, but not yet dissolved. Certain words continue to be sites of conflict, weighted with contempt or embarrassment, hardly to be claimed in public without a measure of defiance. For just these reasons, finding language that voices what we feel and know may be even more crucial to nourishing our sense of who we are than it is for many others. And our survival may depend upon our assembling, more or less deliberately, a tradition of our own, out of what we can find available.

Gillian Spraggs