Children Playing (Nones)
ridere una bellezza, che letizia
era ne li occhi a tutti li altri santi.
Dante, Paradiso 31
It must be 3 p.m. in Paradise
when Dante sees the jeweled shore and stream
resolve themselves into the shining Rose
of endlessness, where Mary smiles at games
of sempiternal jump rope, stickball, jacks
which I see kids, who’ve made good their escape
from slow-rolling prison transport and their six-
hour stretch of cultivation by the state
(so a pimple ball held tightly and released
will reassert itself as a true sphere),
play here where, in a time not pinched or pieced
but, at this Jericho hallelujah hour,
undammed to flow forever as it should,
they know all Dante saw of bliss and good.