Cleopatra
El-Arifi Saara
HarperCollins Publishers
Your historians call me seductress, but I was ever in love's thrall.
Your playwrights speak of witchcraft, but my talents came from the gods themselves.
Your poets sing of my bloodlust, but I was always protecting my children.
How wilfully they refuse to concede that a woman could be powerful, strategic, divinely blessed to rule.Death will silence me no longer.
This is not the story of how I died. But how I lived.