Ubi Sunt

Where are the good ones:
the beautiful, strong, and
virtuous figures of yore?
Probably where the moon is,
hung aloft in effulgent skies:
eating nails for breakfast,
dying in childbirth, then
resurrecting to give it all
away, cyclically, once more. 
I don’t want to be the moon,
I said to Dick on the casting
couch: I want to be a flower
no one can touch without dying
of hope of touching it again.
Something rare and exotic:
throaty stamen, purple pistil.
Something that just stands
on the stage and screams.
Alas, that role is taken,
said Dick, by Suzanne.
Figures, I said. How
about the wild river,
he suggested, kindly.
Or a creek, brook,
rivulet, rill, stream?
But where do I empty,
I asked, before agreeing:
in an ocean, sea, or lake,
or do I just flow into the
ground, a dried-up shrew?
That’s between you and your
character to decide, he said.
The river, you mean, I said.
Yes, he said. For god’s sake,
you’re a woman. Just be you.  

Copyright © 2023 by Virginia Konchan. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 27, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“‘Ubi Sunt’ is a rhetorical question taken from the Latin ‘Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt?’ meaning ‘Where are those who were before us?’ The phrase derives from the Book of Baruch (3:16–19) in the Vulgate Latin Bible (‘Where are the princes of the nations?’) and can be found in medieval literature and Old English homilies. A meditation on mortality and life’s transience, I use the phrase nostalgically, but swerve from nostalgia to dialogue, in suggesting that history’s heroes aren’t always famed men, but instead ordinary women, personified by nature, who regularly perform miracles in labors of life and love.”
—Virginia Konchan