Friday, March 03, 2006

The Mountain

It’s my turn
to rise to the mountain
but the mountain keeps rising
ahead of me.


I keep looking at the valleys
spread thin below my feet,
villages scattered in the groins of the earth.
Mountains are barren, I say,
and looking up always makes me squint.
I don’t like breathing clouds,
and I grew up imploring in song
to be rescued from the fog.


I’ve been up other mountains before
and each I descended
with my pride trailing my feet.
I collect peaks for a living,
but the peaks keep moving on.

Down in the valley
I am sheltered from the wind,
I can pretend my hair is supple still.
But up there…
I fear the heights,
the thin air is so forbidding;
and no tiny bud can make it worth my while.


Down there I will live
where the rivers are near
and the sky is far
and I can hear
the bowels of the earth
churn.

3 comments:

katy said...

love the shape... the highs and the lows (if you were, i guess, to look at it on its side) and that fact that there is just so much it could *mean*

i will read it again, and then again and maybe again again

katy said...

It’s my turn
to rise to the mountain
but the mountain keeps rising
ahead of me.


the river is deeper
than he seems at first glance.
the illusions of fish
feeding on the muddy bottom
dive into a darker part
where my feet do not reach.

Anonymous said...

That one I felt was good, but a trifle too explicit.

And what is with the picture? I see how it is more democratising and "real," but it just shows it as if your nose looked like mine (which is not the case) (and do we not have similar eyes? Ya Allah as if we were brothers). I do not know, there was just something very haughty about the old scan that I missed, probably what exactly you wanted to lose by that new shiny picture of yours.

And uph, Katy had me bump into the wall with that paragraph she introduced. Katy, if you ever read this, tell me where you got it from.

Mwa,
Ton frère Ahmad