The City of Disney, or, What I Learned From Reading Dante

That place is the lowest and the darkest
And the farthest from all-encircling heaven.
I know the pathway well, so rest assured.
   —The City of Dis, Canto IX of The Inferno by Dante Alighieri

Who are the sorry souls who walk these cobbled streets,
I asked my guide, a fresh faced girl from "Iowa."
See how they suffer over there, assembled in a line
beside a writhing seven-headed elephant,
enclosed by metal fence, their heavy bodies basting
in a heat the likes of which I've never experienced.

She led me onward past a darkened cave where
wooden figures sang on the command
of a machine, she called them "tiki tiki" birds.
What sort of place is this, I asked, to punish animals,
and I was grateful not to speak the tiki tiki tongue
and not to know the depth of their eternal pain.

And then! Worst horrors yet. A man transformed
into a giant mouse, another made a dog with
droopy snout, a third a yellow bear with vacant eyes.
She took me to a room where music played,
and my hopes rose until I saw a thousand tiny folk
who chanted of the smallness of their world, over and again.

We fled the place and she embarked us on a boat,
the sinners there awash in screaming toddlers.
And yet the captain of this ship was sorriest,
he told us that for twenty years he had been
navigating round this same short jungle stream,
assaulted every time by seven crocodilians.

The fresh faced girl reached out and took me by the hand.
She said I must be patient now, we would be climbing
for a year along a seven-circled path, and then a cart
would carry us along a metal road back to where we began.
If I survived, she said, I could return to my beloved Italy,
which lies beyond the walls within the park of "Epcot."

© Mark Lipowicz