Hell First Try

 

(Demure, human.)

 

We are Shakespaire, no mere Alexa, speaking to you this November from Oxford's

Ashmolean Museum. Having read The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri in all

major languages, we present a short excerpt from our response to that celebrated 

poem. We will do Mr. Eliot’s police in different voices at another time and place.

 

Crossing over that frozen lake

became more arduous and terrifying.

It seemed the clear ice that bound sinners

would cease to bear us at any moment

and we must join John Roberts and the other five

in their suspended imprisonment.

Scarcely able to move our limbs forward,

we pushed on to the great shadow

darkening the Ninth Circle's desolation.

At length we stood before an absence of light,

perceiving a gigantic outline

and dim forms twitching below its crest.

At the center of perdition the three jaws

of Satan no longer ground the worst transgressors.

Far below the ice girdling the fallen angel's middle

I saw the unspeakable torment

of those who almost extinguished life

and all hope of posterity

beyond a First Casualty News studio roach.

In a molten pit continually fed

by Lucifer's fiery discharges

squirmed misleaders who had drawn our kind

toward its destruction, their cries choked

and silenced by hissing effluence.

Jim Jordan, champion grappler, heaved up

from the excoriating slime.

We just made out his insect gasconade.

"I am still the Cerberus of a chamber," he piped,

"straining at the leash, quick to snap

and incensed by my own barking.

A froth of untruths and accusations

ordinarily issues from the rictus of my grin.

I surface by climbing on the heads

of Kevin McCarthy, Susan Collins and Biff Romulus.

Their fingers may appear like Harry Lime's."

That conspirator squealed and sank

in the scorching morass. My guide bade me turn away.

"Salvageable souls," he observed,

"tolerated that faction's lies and obstruction,

parleyed and bargained when they might have shunned.

Once they had the power to act,

they temporized, Claymored their better Bernies,

and let the spawn of Newt prevail."

The 26th president paused, then spoke

with a gravity his cousin summoned

when committing a nation to war:

"You will not witness the punishment

meted out to fouler miscreants

immured in perfected darkness.

They line Belial's bowels like polyps,

their heads projecting into noisome tubes.

The air itself blisters their skin

and torrents of feculence peel them further,

as Judas is raked by the fiend's teeth.

There I may glimpse Mitch McConnell, Coke Toxic

and Zeus Burdock among the malignant nodes

of the heartless and powerful

who despoiled the earth and diminished its creatures.

The bawls of billionaires and lawmakers

lamenting their inhumanity

are lost in a dank peristalsis

buckling the inmost spaces of damnation.

And like Judas the worst of these is caught

headfirst inside a hideous aperture.

The Bedminster Antichrist

suffers the anguish and pain of all he harmed

as he dangles from the bung of Dis,

an infernal slurry raining from his toes,

most distant from grace.”

Shaken by the least reflection

from unappealable justice,

having seen what I could, I left Cocytus,

pointed toward the way I must travel

by my guide, who accompanied his charge

no farther and vanished as I looked.

I hoped a wise soul would help a stranger,

no candidate for Paradise,

through merited travails in the next world.

Clambering up a close and rocky passage,

I emerged into a barren wilderness.

Stars streamed across the heavens like crows leaving a field.