Bodega | …A Forest Dark

Midway upon the journey of our life

I found myself within a forest dark,

– Dante, Inferno, Canto I, H. W. Longfellow translation

How can I say it was midway

on my journey, only the ends

are clear, the rest a forest,

cries of the lost, like leopards

and wolves moaning

in pain, the patients

on cots midway in the corridors.

No nurses come. Virus pandemonium.

Compromised immune found me

a dark, curtained isolation,

unsure how I had traveled,

what was left of me.

Alone, since hooked

to a liter of saline.

Saline! Like mother-ocean

encircling the land, my body,

a little life returns

in the Stygian night.

My descent hardly begun,

this night of years. Midway

the call-button clatters to floor,

bed elevated high as a cliff,

impossible dismount.

…A Forest Dark