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
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