Language; or, Paradiso

33 lines inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy

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I have been tandem reading classic literature with a friend of mine for the past year—a hobby I can’t recommend enough—and we are currently working our way through the middle ages. We recently finished Dante’s Divine Comedy, a fascinating and far stranger work of literature than I had anticipated. Along with the book, I watched an edifying series of lectures from Open Yale Courses that enhanced the reading experience greatly. This poem was inspired by ideas found in the third and final book of the comedy: The Paradiso.

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Language, or Paradiso

While reading, I encounter
this idea—the language
of God spills out all
around us and through us
and each of us is a singular,

living word. This conception
arrived from a distance 
greater than the human 
difference between two 
distant dialectical structures, 

than four thousand 
gently curving earth
-surface miles, than seven
hundred astronomical years, 
the distance between belief

and confusion. I imagine
myself as a word, the word
of myself, the unreadable 
blur of divine, untranslatable
characters. It is here, 

the tether, transcendent—
the lungcraft, the mouthcraft, 
the worldcraft 
of feathers, once aloft 
in firmament, become vessels

to ink the binding
filaments, invisible 
as the weaver’s own 
creation without this 
dew’s illumination, 

reaching, stretching 
out between—linking
mind to mind.

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