by Michelle DeRose
 |
Beatrice (a Portrait of Jane Morris) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) |
If poets are the unacknowledged
legislators of our world, then may
their list come out as a sonnet,
an epic, an elegy for their lost
childhoods. They have more cause
than Dante to assign names
to descending rings. Only in dreams
and nightmares have sinners paid,
limbs frozen in impotent angles
like bent wisps of straw, forced
to face forever through lids locked
on open how their flesh partook in fraud.
Michelle DeRose lives and writes in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She is Professor Emerita of English at Aquinas College, where she sometimes used her specialty in epic poetry in her teaching. Every new nation/kingdom/regime established in an epic is built upon or requires the destruction of another.