The opening of Dante’s Inferno reads: ‘Nel mezzo del cammino di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura / che la diritta via era smarrita.’ — which could be poetically rendered in English as: “When I had traversed midway on this life’s trail, I woke to myself alone within a shadowed wilderness, for I had lost the right and proper path that never strays.”

no one sees the beautiful woman
awaiting kindred recognition
splendid in her lonely craving
teacup poultice against her inner stab wounds

how the strain of defensive phantasy
motes her off from even simple competence
nor how the dull drone of people drudgery
drank her vitality, blotched out her glisten

who out there maintains their compassion
in the primal promise of her elusive desires
and who could trek her lovepath minus agenda
across the unmapped minefield of her longing

But now dawns the year when Dante’s Beatrice appeared
Spirit guide, dimly sensed, to engage the secret question…

on offer, an altered chart for this impossible biography
if but she crawls this narrowed gauntlet with authentic elan
then like the seeker’s inferno,
become purgatorio, become paradiso
so too for you, the indicated arc,
draws from your thicket unfettered love

_______RS

Notes : At age 35, the 13th century figure Dante Alighieri (something like Italy’s Shakespeare) underwent a mystical initiation during a period of inward turmoil and struggle, the external result being his “Divine Comedy”. It appeared in three volumes: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. The trials in Hell are experienced as abject bitter suffering and hopeless torture. The trials of Purgatory, though mysteriously similar in character, are experienced as transformational lessons. It is mainly the perspective which changes. The experiences in Heaven? Do you honestly imagine them to be without all conflict? No — for nothing real is ever static. The perspective again improves, and the devoted joy of redemption sings like oxygen — everywhere.

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