When Sappho Met Mirabai: A Dialogue on Love and Verse

The scent of jasmine lingers in the air, mingling with salt from a nearby sea and the faint trace of incense curling from a brass burner. Beneath a canopy of stars, two women sit on a stone terrace that overlooks a moonlit garden. The world is quiet but alive, as if the earth itself is listening.

Sappho: I’ve never seen a garden like this. It smells of longing.

Mirabai: And what does longing smell like to you?

Sappho: Like crushed violets and sweat. Like a lover’s breath against your ear when she leans close to whisper your name.

Mirabai: I have never whispered a lover’s name. My longing is for Krishna. My verses are songs to the divine.

Sappho: And yet, isn’t love love? Whether it’s a woman you kiss beneath the stars or a god you chase through verse?

Mirabai: Perhaps. But the love I write of is not of this world. It is eternal. It is beyond the body.

Sappho: So you say. But even divine love must pass through the body to reach the voice. Did you not write of Krishna’s flute and his form?

Mirabai: I did. His form is everything to me. But it is not desire as the world understands it. It is surrender.

Sappho: I surrender too. To the curve of a woman’s neck. To the sound of her laughter. To the ache when she leaves.

Mirabai: That ache is what I sought in the temple, not in the arms of a man.

Sappho: Yet we both wrote in secret, didn’t we? You, fleeing a royal court to dance in the streets. I, exiled to the isle of Lesbos for loving whom I loved.

Mirabai: Yes. They called me mad for refusing to mourn my husband’s death. As if I had not already given my heart to a higher love.

Sappho: They called me a heretic for writing about women as if we mattered. As if our tears and our laughter were worth preserving.

Mirabai: They tried to poison me once. For speaking as if I were free.

Sappho: They tried to erase me. Only fragments remain. Scraps of papyrus with pieces of my heart.

Mirabai: But your voice still echoes. I’ve heard it across centuries.

Sappho: And I’ve heard yours. You sang of Krishna with such fire, even the sand must have burned.

Mirabai: I sang until I could not stand. Until the world turned silent around me.

Sappho: I wrote until my fingers ached. Until the words felt like stars in my throat, waiting to be let go.

Mirabai: And what did you hope to leave behind?

Sappho: Proof that I was here. That I loved. That I burned. That someone like me existed.

Mirabai: I wrote so I could vanish into the divine. So that I would no longer be Mirabai, but only the echo of his flute.

Sappho: Then perhaps that is the difference. I wanted to be remembered as myself. Not just as a vessel, but as the voice.

Mirabai: And yet, in your fragments, I find something familiar. A woman reaching for what the world told her she could not have.

Sappho: And in your songs, I hear the same hunger. Not for a man, or a god, but for a life that belongs to you.

Mirabai: Perhaps that is the thread that binds us. Not love, but freedom.

Sappho: Yes. Freedom to love, to write, to burn, to vanish — or to be remembered.

Mirabai: Then may all women who pick up a pen find that thread.

Sappho: And may they find the courage to follow it.

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Talk to Mirabai on HoloDream to hear her speak of devotion and defiance, or ask Sappho about the power of love in poetry.