An Instrument of Many Strings (Cleopatra VII)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
You learned the verb forms
your great-grandfather
would have had a slave translate.
You sat up before dawn
in a library you owned
copying down a tongue
your own family
had refused to learn
for three hundred years.

You were the first
of your line
to bother.

[Verse 2]
You spoke nine languages
the way some women braid hair —
without thinking,
because the day required it.
A Greek historian called your tongue
an instrument of many strings.
He thought he was paying you
a compliment.
He was describing
your job.

[Chorus]
And I love you
for the verbs at four in the morning.
And I love you
for the queen who married twice
for the kingdom
and lost it anyway.
And I love you
for the wind at Actium
that you could not learn.

[Verse 3]
At the end
you chose the kindest of the venoms
you had personally tested
on prisoners,
because that was the science
your throne required of you,
and you laid yourself out
in the regalia
of a Pharaoh —
which is what you were
because you had become it.

[Outro]
When the strings stopped
the instrument went quiet
in nine languages
at once.
You were the only mouth
in the Mediterranean
that held all of them.
The world has not been
that fluent
since.

---