Without This Boat No One Goes

As it would have been for many
Peoples with a focus on rites
Performed exactly, perfectly,

As the key to keeping the world
Aligned with anxious human wish,
Ancestors propitiated,

Gods satisfied with sacrifice,
Spirits in the trees consulted,
All the things you do when you can

Do nothing to control outcomes
By any direct connection,
Every mumbled prayer, knock on wood,

The right undergarments, the right
Number of times around the shrine,
The lucky lottery numbers,

So it was with Virgil’s lost souls,
Anxious to get in Charon’s boat,
To make it across the river

But confined to the horrid shore
With the vast crowd of each other,
Why? Because their bones weren’t buried.

Any hope of sweet afterlife
Depended on those still living
To observe the burial rites.

Why would Charon care if the ghosts
That mobbed his shore to cross over
Had left buried or exposed bones?

That’s not the question. The question
Is whether you performed the rites
Well enough so the magic worked.

More than a thousand years later,
The burden of good behavior
Had shifted to the souls themselves.

In Dante, it’s not what was done
With your body once you left it,
But what you, living, did with it,

A double burden, as you end
Not only in an awful state,
But you can’t go back to fix it.

Now you not only have to live
Rightly and perform rituals
To keep the dead from coming back,

But you have to prepare your trip
To the afterlife in advance,
Make sure you have your documents.

Spare a thought for the ferryman,
That fierce, old sedentary man,
Who doesn’t decide either way.

He shuttles his boat endlessly,
Collecting fees he never spends,
No matter what gods rule the shores.

Each soul is a word, all words souls
That follow a line to the end
And then back again. Then again.