PURGATORIO: VIRGIL’S LAMENT by Medha Singh

What one would give to be loved in the way that they love.
Always the same tragedy: romantics left to suffer the basic, pragmatic.

I see you, Dante. Even in your dreams you’re dreaming of her.
So remote is she. Yet your spirit never tires of the same hallucination.

Balancing will against destiny on this strange shore
your might grows weary, but you know it not.
(Is she so different from any shade here?)

Must we begin again, to begin again? ‘Halt!’ a voice goes.
It is time for concert. Casella begins to chant, croon.

He must ease the pain of your living soul. Hear of the Exodus,
damned Princes. You who enslaved and on earth, wrung all life out.

“I sing” he moans “so you return to grace.” So you know rapture, and yet
“…must I always humiliate myself, contending against heavenly song

..playing eternal, and open on that wide, heavenly slope?”
Dante, it is God we always return to, and only for a moment

…we find ourselves seduced by the beauteous. I warn you, hear this tale:
Belacqua, ignorant of his affliction, with apatheia

looming over his changing fate, even he, Pilgrim, has come
to marvel at your shadow. Such is beauty’s grasp here. Wishful, distant.

Manfred and his sheep, an undulating thousand burn within,
appear as a soapy oceantide of outcastes. With the same song, they wait.

I helm this world, though Cato may believe otherwise. I do it for you.
Local wardens only keep to their business, never knowing what to tell us.

It is I who does, Dante. Listen:
lightly,

ascend.

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Poetry at Sangam