I see you, Enhaduanna, staring out

from a luscious, hanging garden, your hands

scented by almond and quince, those golden apples

from the fertile crescent’s flood plains.

In the desert heat, you rest your Lyre on a wall

of baked bricks in bitumen mortar and begin to write

with your reed stylus, press syllables

into wet clay tablets: hymns, prayers and poems

that describe how your Innanna howls like hurricanes

screams like tempests. I too have dated women

who seemed divine until their perilous scorpion stings

made me lament how days were morphed by sandstorm.

I imagine you wailing in that holy cloister

with your ritual basket after she banished you

to the shadowlands, how you watched other women,

happy, in the perfumeries of the agora

by the ebbing Euphrates. You told how betrayal

and banishment, confused your mouth of honey,

and turned your beautiful face to dust.

I envisage even the vines from the Iranian mountains

must have wept into tributaries from the Tigris.

Selina Whiteley (she/her) has been published in two books, “Up to Our Necks in It” and “The Kaleidoscope Chronicles” as well as in various magazines. Most recently, she was published in Literary Veganism and in The Lake. She will have two poems published in Neon Mariposa in May 2020.