When Aštart Sings, by Roula Maria Dib

Astarte Syriaca, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (UK) 1877.

When Aštart Sings

A star drops by, where she is consecrated—in Tyre,
Where the ever-vigilant tales of honour
inscribe the history of a land of epics.
For them, from them, she returns, emerging,
like a Phoenix nostalgic for life,
rising with the crimson coquelicots--
which, like Adonis, kiss life in every drop of death.

As she arises, they wait for the ariose vision.
There is a divine, diffused, profuse scent of glory 
hovering above the crowds of the human Sea, 
upon the stretched fingers of longing voices 
reaching out to her, in breathless unison,
among the tremoring waves of a thundering ground.

When Aštart sings, 
She cries—and beams, facing Dido,
Striking heart, chord, and harpsichord,
as the moon finds its reflection in the radiance of her smile.
The serenity of her soulful face and resonating essence, 
reach out to all in euphony like the first golden threads of dawn.
And she sings…
As a tender breeze whistles out of her woodwind being
blowing flute-breath along the vibes of an ancient lyre
and the melody of the grandest lute.
She sings…
With conversing eyes and a sighted voice, endowing all
With a fortune of tune, for tunes
Are the pulse of an indelible vision she dreams into life.
She sings…
For glory, for love, for hope, for victory…
As her grand, free soul unleashes in a spinning gust,
Engulfing all in her presence,
Moving the gentle leaves of being into harmonious dance,
Whirling, wheeling, softly, swiftly, to the allegro of the hurricane. 
And she sings…

Roula-Maria Dib
​
Dr. Roula-Maria Dib is a professor, researcher, and writer interested in the intersections of literature and psychology. She has written and published on canonical writers (such as Miguel de Cervantes, Hilda Doolittle, W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, and James Joyce), psychoanalysts (mainly Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung), and artists (Vincent Van Gogh, Wyndham Lewis, Salvador Dali, Agnolo Bronzino, Sandro Botticelli, and others). Dr. Dib is a member of the T.S. Eliot Society of the UK, Literary London, The International Association of Jungian Studies, The Jungian Society of Scholarly Studies, and the British Association of Modernist Studies, and has presented papers on modernist studies at numerous universities in Europe. Her poems, essays, and articles have appeared in journals such as The Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism (ARAS), Non Credo, Agenda, The Oxford Culture Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Two Thirds North, and the Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies. She is currently working on her book, Jungian Metaphor in Modernist Literature.​ She is the editor of Indelible, a journal of arts at the American University of Dubai.