Mimi-Mona Poetry: Suspecting nothing

Betrayal in Dante’s Inferno — “That is the lowest place, it is the darkest, And the furthest from that heaven on which all turns” (Canto IX, lines 28-29)

©Suspecting nothing

in a dream that set me apart

as a double-edged warning

plunged into my heart

with an inescapable foreboding,

I bowed low and spread my arms

in a sign of surrender.

Death, with its dark charms,

denied me a blinder of mercy

so I might recognize

those with a dark proclivity for

traitorous acts that would ostracize

the one who, hereinbefore,

lay innocently asleep,

held aground by the neap.

Not traitors with a mere flaw

of desire, but those

with a spiritual flaw;

a flaw the devil chose,

one he wished to go

to the deepest part—

to the core of their soul.

Not to their undeserving heart.

I passed by and gazed into

the darkest, the deepest,

cell where he threw

them into the lowest...

It was there I saw my

betrayers held captive—

I wanted to cry

because I could not believe

they were the most

evil doers of all,

cowering in form of a ghost

behind that wall—

in the ninth circle of hell.

were the betrayers of family ties.

I cried out, “I know them full well!”

Not even Dante gave them disguise.

by Mimi Wolske

All Rights Reserved