"Trust" (poem) >>> The Ninth Level of Hell

Throughout history, betrayal, in all its guises, has been ground-zero for human heartbreak, misery and sorrow. Shakespeare knew it and used it to great effect. Dante's Inferno imagined a Hell comprised of 9 Levels. The final and deepest level, even below murderers and rapists, was the eternal resting place for traitors, betrayers and oathbreakers.

Modernists would argue that historical notions of commitment and loyalty are archaic, an artifice of a bygone era when Men believed the Earth was flat. As I wade through the carnage of broken lives left in the aftermath of the enlightened, what some people call social progress, I see no reason to doubt that Dante got the arrangement right.