Dante's Shepherd

George Murray
From:   London Magazine. London, England, 2008

(Inferno, Canto XXIV, lines 1-15 Revisited)

At dawn I walk to the bank in the rain,
hood-peak pinned with one blue hand and wrist
forced from its sleeve (while its twin does not deign

to ditch the cuff, but hides instead, a fist
worrying, a clenching/unclenching tide,
mulling its wish to progress and subsist).

The sky clears again while I am inside,
scuttling the dull clouds of a costal morning
for white litter on blue, with sun cockeyed.

It leans down on the hills as though scorning
any doubt that the universe still lives
without my happiness in bloom, warning,

Look down at those matching hands: where one thrives,
flush with life, if stiff and warming, the other,
also red and aching, only now arrives.

Poem 1 | Poem 2 | Poem 3 | Poem 4 | Poem 5 | Poem 6

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