insomnia dances with a classics major

I wake a starving artist,
a modern day Sappho,
writing poetry about your star-curved hips.

Did you know
you move in your sleep?

Bones and sinew shift to poses new,
each a constellation that the gods would shun,
your skin soaked body draped like silk over an Athens’ night sky.

Like the thick hair wrapped around your shoulders,
bits of pale collar bone showing through.
Sometimes I think I can see the universe in these gaps,
like the stars between the inky black space.

And the angles of your spine,
which could call for war in the sun,
seem at once as strong as Olympus
and as fragile as Persephone’s divide
in these honest hours.

I stare at pomegranate lips,
plump with life, curved like sin,
and long to taste
again again again-

Oh, the Greeks would worship you.
But it is well enough that I am the only one to pray at your temple,
for us humans are so petty in our lust for gods.