Smear

POEM 4
“Smear”

by Anthony Dernellis

 

You throw the mud away and it sticks. For mud slinging is common on the international stage

And if it's thrown by friends, it becomes more dangerous
and predictably explains the muddy stereotypes, whatever is set up in a way,
the knots, the grips, the vicious asymmetrical influence on the rope of history.

 

Many are the examples of distorting patterns
that have been stepped on and nurtured in complex syndromes of nations and communities
and formed long ago, in the depths of the ages,
are now being reproduced accurately, on the basis of prejudices built on mud.

 

For example, there in the old days, after Sappho's death, two hundred years later,
some Ionians, of another society, found it hard to accept freedom
of women in Aeolian society without being accused of immorality.
Oh, what civility!

 

And then, much, much later, the Ionian, Roman society
the same muddling tactics towards something alien to its own "custom".
It brings out an Ovid and a Tatian to "translate"
the smoother and more equal action of men for a woman,
a symptom of erotic mania and a sign of homosexuality.

 

There is no need for other sources and other comments on the easy conclusion
that shows how long that smear has endured to this day,
that the West has imposed the label "Lesbian"
to such an important degree that the true meaning of the word has been diminished
against what? The centuries-old artificial, straightforward mud-slinging, to everyone's surprise.

 

An example of this is the anti-Byzantine clearly propagandistic stygian smear,
where those very old, distorting, tried and tested stereotypes
were again used to suggest firmly and subliminally
that the entire cultural contribution of Byzantium to humanity, well,
was, ostensibly, the fork, the "instrument" or the chicly accepted erudition of the Greek!

 

Behind the West's concerns about Byzantine culture
is that perception that it passed off the post-schism ethno-dogmatic differences
as a compliment against Byzantine women,
such as the two princesses in the West, Maria Argyri and Theophano Skleri.

 

From the smear against Sappho to that of Byzantium, a thousand years have passed.
Should we hope it won't take another thousand years
for the mankind to overcome such distorting stereotypes
based on complex syndromes?