January 28, 2024

722 years ago today,
Dante kneeled at Hell’s old gates.
He told a lesson in over fourteen thousand lines—
condensed an entire universe for humans to survive.

The message that keeps living
from that distant, ancient past
is humanity’s forgotten
and repeated master class.

Forgetful, we keep rolling—
we rise and fall through the same shape,
the same loop that keeps on looping:
the loop of life, of hell, of grace.

At Hell’s old gates, Dante is kneeling,
and he travels further down.
So are we—returning endlessly
to the old program of forgotten nouns.

Dante warned us that the landing
will burn like fire in our lungs:
the burn of shame and broken glory,
the burn of seeing we were going down.

Remember—the burning wasn’t fire.
The burning was a sense of shame.
The fire isn’t in a furnace;
the burn is from within your veins.

And from the heat our eyes are closing,
our ears are filled with tears.
Dante tried with all his spirit
to tell you something you would hear:

Love. Justice. Beauty. Courage.
The guiding crumbs along your path—
the nouns that lead you upward,
the program that helps humans last.