Robert Verdon, #98, Purgatorio

we both have got into the habit of walking up a mountain

needing aerobic exercise and that hard-won overview

something you never get in a gym, you surely know:

the god lives at the top, you feel it in your soul

when you stamp all that way, although we haven’t quite

gone all that way yet, but audacious as we are

pretend to be Dantë or Moses, casting rashly about for

cornices and stone tablets, blinded penitents and of course

burning bushes … on second thoughts, not even one,

though it’s early April … tugged at insistently by

gravity, staring up at the great white Telstra Tower

with a numinous frisson we both agree is certainly awe.