On September 14th, Dante’s Death Day
gone 700 years today
leaving us here, in the
middle kingdom
Purgatory
which was Paradise once
but which we soiled
and are about to
turn into hell, or
at least an Inferno
for homo sap sap, the
disappearing species
— if it comes to that —
there’s life
left, there will be
life left
and right
it will move
on, even without us
it will rejoice in us
gone — I can hear the
birds celebrating
the trees too
the air cooling
the sea cooling
it will be the real paradise
the one sans-sapiens,
that arrogant inter-
ference!
Copyright © 2022 by Pierre Joris. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 27, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.
“The title gives both the time and the occasion of this poem: the seven hundredth anniversary of Dante Alighieri’s death—an occasion which allowed or prompted me to reread some cantos of his Divine Comedy, and to rethink its cosmological, three-partite Christian Weltanschauung. Seven hundred years later, in a post-theologically organized universe, Purgatory appears as the most ‘down-to-earth’ (pun intended) possibility. The poem goes with that, and with the most obvious ‘global’ problem: the ecological disaster the human species has fabricated by its thoughtless and greedy exploitation of what was our original paradise—this planet.”
—Pierre Joris
Pierre Joris
Pierre Joris, born in Strasbourg, France in 1946, was raised in Luxembourg. Since age eighteen, he has moved between Europe, the U.S., and North Africa and holds both Luxembourgian and American citizenship.