Niobe and me
by Lara Dolphin
after Leto and Niobe by Sappho
Before we were mothers, we had been friends. A goddess, a queen.
One wreathed in laurels; the other in violets. Your pride should have been my joy
and my torment your burden. But now your grief is my strife, and I wear it like a crown.
A descendant of immigrants, Lara Dolphin lives with her family among the Allegheny Mountains of Central Pennsylvania on the ancestral land of the Susquehannock/Iroquois people. She has written three chapbooks In Search Of The Wondrous Whole, Chronicle Of Lost Moments, and At Last a Valley. She, like countless others, hopes for a world filled with greater peace.