To Beatrice!
written by: Benjamin J. Sams
What light!
What dawning of such a glorious glow,
So poised to dispel the rankest torrents of darkness,
The Malevolent, the molten,
The frozen, the charred and the churning,
Mind fixed on benevolent formation.
And as dawn’s dewdrop is generated,
Progressing contrary
To common relationships
Of light and liquid
You become manifest,
Formed through light and shaped by eternity,
Just as the dark of a starry sky
Sojourns, a changeling, away from night,
And disc, breathing its last into the dawn,
Surrenders birth to orb.
And yet what wonder of the heavens
Could ever hope to parallel
Your limitless and irreproachable love?
Oh, Beatrice!
How utterly beset was your Poet,
Now on paths to Paradise,
But only once a tear-laden farewell to his beloved guide,
And drawn no longer by any other,
But by recollection of your heavenly wish.
And how Your Grace shed tears,
Fluid, coloured and glimmering deepest crystalline,
In wisdom’s deepest sorrow,
Trusted, equanimous and sympathetic
A flame burning hot within
The very heart of compassion,
Carefully curated, forever,
And here enshrined by the Infinite,
Unshakable as the foundations of Intention Herself!
Avalo, Vajra and Manju,
Francis, Christopher, Michael,
And saintliest of vessels, sweet Holy Mother.
Present in your company as well,
Shantida, Pambhava,
Every spirit from every place and position,
Descending in wealth of spirit
Until at last are reached, those putrid souls
For whom time shall at last become meaningless,
Along with any hope of escaping
That icy chasm of His deepest exile.
And His Seed grown holy, who,
For the sake of all humanity,
Was so shamelessly fated to personify,
Though no jury of wisdom,
High in understanding and expression
As such abstractions, daring to claim Knowledge
Could possibly comprehend,
Found within himself
That most deliberate and grotesque expression of
Unshakable faith in devotion.
And oh, the virtues gathered,
Borne of His most brutal commitment
To a torment, inaccessible to polite description,
Save to declare it ruthless,
Savage and remorseless –
Clumsy euphemisms.
And as surging oceans,
Comprised of chaos stretching past light,
Their every cell, petrified with fear,
Stripped slowly to the bone,
Forced onward under threat of wasp and flame;
Those legions who,
Incapable of shifting angle from their approach,
Having toiled and endured and toiled again,
Those who, contorted by pain,
Feverishly exhausted, eternally cry,
“It will ever be the lash and cane for we,
And Poseidon’s tools, meanwhile!
Bloodthirst cries for the hook,
And each of us assembled here,
We who are at the mercy of Him presiding over it all,
We are of such numbers that
To attempt a count of one’s fellow suffering souls,
Is kin to trying to count the years we will spend here –
A vain pursuit!
And each one of us,
Now due his turn,
Were the lions.
And even if borne of love,
By our heresy, we were forced to play the lamb.
But fear not!
All of us will pay handsomely
The undercroft, after our slaughter.”
It is that thing each one fears and loves most,
That beats and wails at their backs and necks,
And at their bellies,
Pounding through centuries of distension.
Panic and madness,
Those souls living on planes so far removed,
Their hopelessness a punchline for the fearful.
And according to the root nature of each,
Such darkness arose within those fallen masses.
And so we can’t but be moved,
Directing one’s windows of psychology
Into the black of that gaping absence of light,
But the sound stays with me today.
And as your tears, Fairest Beatrice,
Brought to life that blood-stained soil in my dream
Where one cannot stand to bear witness,
But is left to fall in rags
To the writhing, odoriferous and steaming ground,
We are safer rushing toward the hour of death,
But asleep is not the same thing:
The one true flame left burning within?
A pain-stained labyrinth and this wretched macabre!
Their company is the rotting dung, the wasps, the flies,
And their sorrows become the scabs they peel and chew,
And the wretched bile ever to be suckled, without nourishment,
By they, beyond.
Those starving spirits,
From the very Inception,
Through this vain and grotesque hardship,
Endured through aeons,
And their deliverance is the wrath of legions.
“We are compelled to walk distances incalculable.”
They would go on to say,
“Only to be repurposed – reforged
Into bread we cannot eat, and into pus we cannot drink.
Lost in a storm of dissociation
From which we daren’t attempt escape.”
He also saw you, Noble Beatrice,
Light of all Lights,
Eyes streaming salty wishes
For the completion of their task,
Alive, and allied within
That Grand Assembly
From whence the very first spark
Of compassion’s light bore forth,
Unhindered by the darkness,
And en garde for the obligations of day,
Reach out and lay claim to the dawn.
For those putrid and pathetic hordes,
Tormented and sallowed by need so hungry
They, quick to take life for mere sustenance,
Fling themselves headlong
Into the furthest reaches of the avaricious,
To receive their punishment.
And it was in that moment when, at last,
They raised their tear and blood-stained cheeks.
And though the idea of such
Could never bestow true understanding,
We came to comprehend their fate.
And at that moment,
When at once their weakening focus
Pulled suddenly and sharply into view,
The cautionary words carved into that
Most ancient and ominous vestibule,
Hoisted high, long before Her first bite,
Adam’s greatest regret
From which all wither,
Dessicated and damned.
To the ceaseless horror of those
Wanton souls, stated all too clearly
For the point to be missed,
“Abandon Ye All Hope, Who Enter Here!”
Oh, Beatrice, how you weep.
How I wish I could weep
for those sullen creatures –
Animals as critically flawed
As has been the reasoning of those
destined for the very terminus
of that most unholy Ninth –
And just to the extent that
I fail in my pursuit of unwavering compassion,
To that very length of time
The reminder of my fault shall continue
To raze my grief to utter devastation.
So, if it please you, oh Profound Glory!
Pray, allow me to stay with you a while,
That I may once again find the dawn
as I plod longingly through the darkness;
Allow that I may feel the warmth of virtue
If even for but a moment;
I pray thee,
Lift me up to the glory of the heavens
So that I may see the path to righteousness.
Oh Beatrice!
What word surrounding life
Can breathe so fresh a breath of cleansing air
Than that fateful word I would hear you speak,
And so gently would it utter from your lips,
All the hordes of that most Unholy Nine,
Would be like the infant at birth,
Cold, hungry, afraid…
Humbled by its circumstance –
Tearful and guilt-ridden eyes cast low.
And they wouldn’t be fit to help themselves
From lying themselves flat on that putrid ground,
That they may assemble themselves in such a way
As to express rightly their liberating humility.
Would they then understand, oh Beatrice,
The depths of their depravity?
Would they then comprehend the necessity of virtue
To those who would suffer otherwise?
Oh Beatrice, I who have been no right saint,
What then can I possibly do to avoid the dark?
What could I possibly do to pay to a satisfactory extent
The tally I have racked up
Over the course of my Unexamined Life?
I can see in your eyes I will not find joy in your answer.
What’s more, I have wasted your time, oh Light of All Lights:
I know there is nothing I can do to avoid it.
Simply the wish to avoid such fates, though natural,
Is cause enough for a short visit.
What then to say for my decades of selfish aims?
How could one compute the suffering I myself
Inflicted wholesale onto others,
Through my defilements and my ignorance?
The answer is that there is no way
To remove my soul from future torment.
It is said that one can only start from where one is at.
Oh, Beatrice, above all other proclamations,
I pray so deeply and with such hope and regret
That I may, upon the hour of my Earthly departure,
Having turned all will over to that of the highest wisdom
And having taken stock in trade of my side,
Having uncovered my assets and liabilities,
If I were to direct my every cell to the benefit of others,
How even then could I dare to believe
That by one one-thousandth of a speck of dust
I might have paid the bill for my destruction?
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