Damned

“Inferno” by Marina Petro

(A modest homage to Dante)

 

 

abandon hope all ye who enter here

melt into the matrix of unclean souls

become one with the stygian night

a miasma of ill-conceived dreams

swirls in cornerless shadows aflame

with dead screams in a sulfurous air

down unspeakable steps of gauged agony

leading to the basest of sinners who

practiced betrayal as branded by Judas

caught frozen for time beyond end

in perpetual pain of the ice-pit

fourth nethermost ring of the final

ninth circle where the faces of Satan

make meals of the fear and the guilt

come too late to the worst of the damned

Transition

“Inferno” Canto 34 Illustration by Daniele Albatici

Dante and Virgil
climbed fearfully
downward that
terrible torso
gargantuan Satan
clinging to dense evil
black belly hair
crawled into his navel
dark sense-deprived
center of earth where
an upside down
inside out portal
repugnant to physics
inconstant of sane
esthetic perspective
did somehow
enable escape
through ascension
from deepmost
ninth circle of hell
to deliver the pair
unto dewy repentance
aswirl on the fetid
island-borne mountain
whose seven
tiers traced the
yet unexplored
path to paradise

Firenze

“Dante and Beatrice, on Via Lungarno at Ponte Santa Trinita” by Henry Holiday

scatter my ashes
where Dante watched Beatrice
and death made a poet

here blood of my blood
did thrive in the renaissance
born to the pen

Palazzo Lenzi on Piazza Ognissanti – 2 blocks from the scene of Dante painted above

Charlatan

“Everyday Deception”
Drawing by Agnieszka Bloch
From headspacemagazine.com

secrets rot in some tombs
unknown features of character
purposely hidden in life
masquerade being method
for cowards to cope
with the guilt of their fraud
with embarrassing
self-appraised flaws
that humiliate conscience
that mortify ego
to such an extent
drastic fiction
becomes a man’s story
an insincere lifetime
whose tale clever told
through the mouth of a mask
fooled acquaintances friends
and the people he loved

as for me I’m with Dante
who settled them nicely
down deep in the infernal bowels
the trenches of malebolge
eighth of the circles of hell