[Inferno]
“Dante’s
Inferno is a comic opera by comparison.”
(Etty
Hillesum, July 1942)
Longing
for a normal day
making
do with what they’ve got
anything
for a quiet life
two
classical personages
pretend-humble
stumble
upon
the average psychopath
locked
in frozen pits forever
dead
spit of what sin is.
Remarks
they make help clarify
as
the next avalanche
sweeps
they themselves very them
off
the isthmus
between
the cape of no hope
and
the islands of remorse
there
forever condemned to write
quaint
in dainty terza rima
the
truth of no way out
and
no way back.
Brought
up in all the right schools
trained
in how a joke saves years
they
had not imagined this:
the
long abnormal weeks
there
to make sense of the abyss,
quietly
talking to absence
where
every day could be the last
there
beneath the latest rubble
or
refugees on no known path
at
the gates of Kyiv
eyeless
in Gaza
and
what next year in Jerusalem
texting
meaning by the light of a torch
attending
to the near and dear
near
or far, needing food and sleep.
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