After Dante
I
The night grows late. I turn another page
and feel the ash of years about my feet.
Not Hell’s hot fire, but this more patient stage
where time and penance quietly repeat.
No demons rove my road, no devils jeer—
only the steady climbing of the day,
the long rehearsal of collecting years
in which eventually one learns to pray.
In time you met a second guide to light
your watchful way from rootlessness toward Grace.
I walk these terraces with mortal sight
and ask where I might find my Beatrice.
For some (I’m one), such clarity comes slow.
You wrote, Just go, and you will know.
II
I turned and found myself alone. Afraid
once more. My steps unsure. Your voice was gone.
No one to point the way to light at dawn.
I am confused, in ash-pale disarray.
The path I knew withdrew, like words astray
when meaning breaks and logic’s refuge gone.
My heart, long schooled in reason, stood withdrawn,
afraid to choose, afraid to disobey.
Yet in this gauzy scene there stirred a gleam,
a figure formed where wavering shadows bend;
Her brightness cut the fabric of my dread.
Was she of certainty, or but a dream?
Had my dazed senses fashioned to amend
the void where Virgil once had led?
III
Am I awake? Asleep? I cannot say.
A peak in sight awakes my soul’s desire.
Its summit veiled beyond the dawn’s first blaze.
I turn to climb with hope that does not tire.
A path winds round a mountain like a gyre
where steep are steps that rise inside a haze.
A figure floats within the gauzy air
and speaks, To Paradiso you will rise.
She bids me stop to step into a sphere
of air and upward through more spheres we pass
when at the brink of Paradiso she declares,
Here mortal sight surrenders at the last.
And then I woke—or dreamed I woke. I heard her say,
Dear Pilgrim, which world holds you now, this day?
James Edward Green has published six chapbooks of poetry and individual poems have appeared in literary journals in Ireland, Canada, the UK, and the USA. In addition, he has co-translated a collection of poems by the Myanmar poet Maung Sein Win. He divides his time between his home in Muncie, Indiana, and Mae Hong Son, Thailand, where he serves as a volunteer education consultant for the Jesuit Refugee Service.
