Inferno: Canto 26

/ Issue 13.1 /

The prisoners are lugging a cauldron of soup
Suspended from a sagging bamboo pole
That’s stretched across their emaciated shoulders.

The one in his twenties beseeches the one in his teens:
“You must remember these verses, dear Pikolo.
It’s what Ulysses says to shore up his crew:

Consider well the seed that gave you birth:
You were not made to live your lives like beasts,
But to be followers of worth and knowledge.”

All the way to the Lager they sing those lines,
Lugging a cauldron of soup that hangs from a pole
Suspended between their skeletal shoulder blades.

Interviewed decades later, the French electrician
Remembers nothing of the Dante lesson
That meant so much to his bookish Italian friend.

But he does recall most vividly that time
He sat with Primo Levi in the dark,
And how for half an hour they conjured up

Their childhoods as they talked about their mothers.
Unlike the great Ulysses, whose Antiklea
Passed through his arms like smoke, for half an hour

Their faces lit by the blaze of the burning corpses.

George Kalogeris

George Kalogeris

George Kalogeris’s most recent book of poems is Guide to Greece, (Louisiana State University, 2018). He is also the author of a book of paired poems in translation, Dialogos (Antilever, 2012), and of a book of poems based on the notebooks of Albert Camus, Camus: Carnets (Pressed Wafer, 2006). His poems and translations have been anthologized in Joining Music with Reason, chosen by Christopher Ricks (Waywiser, 2010).
George Kalogeris

Also by George Kalogeris (see all)

Author: George Kalogeris

George Kalogeris’s most recent book of poems is Guide to Greece, (Louisiana State University, 2018). He is also the author of a book of paired poems in translation, Dialogos (Antilever, 2012), and of a book of poems based on the notebooks of Albert Camus, Camus: Carnets (Pressed Wafer, 2006). His poems and translations have been anthologized in Joining Music with Reason, chosen by Christopher Ricks (Waywiser, 2010).