Poem | After Paradise

Reading Dante changes everything:

  the vision is the fact

  and the vision an eternal spring

  an angel-muse makes exact

  of innocence, at journey’s end

  given back; one looks up into night,

  one remembers what is beyond:

      the empyrean, its great rose pane

        (each facet like a sun is a soul

         alive with holy love, alight;

         bright angels racing through the whole

         of it, singing, numerous as rain).