Ascent
The world below is a tangle of green and gray,
Where the two rivers meet in a braided, liquid knot,
Their voices a low, distant hum that fades away
As I leave the soft earth for the wild, forgotten plot.
There is no path here, no boot-worn ribbon of dust,
Only the moss-heavy logs that I step across,
Sinking into the damp, decaying crust,
Where time is measured in layers of velvet moss.
Higher now, where the timber begins to thin,
And the alpine line draws a boundary of bone,
Where the breath grows shallow and cold begins to win,
And the world is composed of nothing but wind and stone.
The granite peaks, they carry the weight of ages,
Weathered into faces, etched by the frost and the glare—
Old, silent watchers, turning their stony pages,
Staring into the void of the thinning air.
A Clark’s nutcracker spirals, a flash of white and black,
Its harsh, raspy kree-aaaa echoing off the wall,
While a mountain chickadee, fearless on its track,
Sings a thin, sweet dee-dee-dee that seems so small.
The wind is a ghost that whistles through the scree,
A sharp, biting breath that smells of the coming snow;
It carries the secrets of places that never were free,
And the silence that only the highest summits know.
My lungs are a furnace, my legs are heavy as lead,
But the summit beckons, a crown of jagged light,
Where the clouds are snagged on the peaks like cotton thread,
And the world drops away in a dizzying, beautiful flight.
I scramble the final ridge, a desperate, reaching hand,
Until the ground levels out—the pinnacle, the goal—
The vast, sprawling ache of the wild and ancient land,
Reflecting the quiet, final truth of a searching soul.
This was the climb that defined the map of my days,
The summit I whispered to in the dark of a younger night;
Now I stand in the stillness, lost in the sun’s gold haze,
Caught in the reach of the peak, and the blinding white.
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