THE ATHEIST

My mind dwelling perfectly on death’s incommodation

cries “Away with soothing literature

and lofty wisdom!” — that famous Roman

calm at his blather before they broke him on the rack....

The night I opened Hell and saw Ugolino set

his teeth into Ruggieri’s hair, I turned my head away,

but slow enough I caught a muddy swinish grin,

and then the teeth hit bone and I was forced to look.

His hair bleeding (and Ugolino’s upper lip

was pushed against the nose from biting) Ruggieri grinned,

Ruggieri said: “Yet I am I”, and I crouched stunned.

There is no cruelty to match no God at all.

Me for the rectangular bed, bad earth

my blanket, bone and beneath ache,

not even wishing someone drilled a hole and thrust

a tube to periscope some sky to me.

Eternal blank, worse than any pain.

[That famous Roman: Boethius, writing The Consolation of Philosophy before dying in prison in the year 524. The Hell of the poem is of course Dante’s, Canti XXXII and XXXIII.]