pen to paper

Midway through the journey of our life
I found myself within a dark wood,
for the straight way had now been lost.

Ah, how hard it is to describe that wood,
a wilderness so gnarled and rough
the very thought of it brings back my fear.

Death itself is hardly more bitter;
but to tell of the good that I found there
I will speak of the other things I saw.

I cannot say just how I entered that wood,
so full of sleep was I at the point
when I abandoned the road that runs true.

But when I reached the foot of a hill
that rose up at the end of the valley
where fear had pierced me through to the heart,

I lifted my eyes and saw its shoulders
already bathed in the light of that planet
that leads us straight along every path.

This calmed the lake of my heart
that had surged with terror all through the night
that I had just spent so piteously.

Stanley Lombardo’s translation of Inferno (2009); Gustave Dore’s engraving Dante and Virgil Leaving the Dark Wood (1890)

Carol Ann Duffy

Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So, a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hand and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.

Some nights, although we are faithless, the
truth / enters our hearts, that small familiar
pain; / then a man will stand stock-still, hearing
his youth / in the distant Latin chanting of a train.

Pray for us now. Grade I piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child’s name as though they named their loss.

Darkness outside. Inside, the radio’s prayer—
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.