When All Has Changed

When All Has Changed

The memory will blur with the fade of time.
I will be unable to restore,to sharpen the blurred edges of that picture,
seen from a far-off height:
the valley of pines I know lay far down in the northeast,
the endless distance where the peaks never stopped mounting, one beyond another,
snowy, barren, alive…
But I cannot wholly forget the cold wind as the breath was draw from me
and carried into open skies.
No one breathes here but the mountains

Mountains
daring me to be, to sit among them
and feel my smallness…to feel
in the stillness
the absolute weight
that must move the earth though standing still.

It’s so quiet here…
Listen as the ancient speaks
Unmoving
Immense rock thrust far above us,
far beyond us now.
It’s all that we can see
surrounded by titans of standing stone
row upon jagged row,
snowy now in summer
with waterfalls and stony rivulets falling
into aquamarine glacial lakes,
the ice-melt a river that would take us,
if we let it,
down beyond this panorama
into the valleys we once thought we knew

‘Til now
when all has changed
because for an hour we stood on the shoulder of something
never made by human hands,
never aware of our tread.
These the ever-watchmen of all time,
witnesses of tumult and power,
await with the enduring patience of stone
another end
another Day
of Glory to surpass these that are but the granite sands of an hour glass.
Other Hands carved them out.
Other Hands hold them now.
And one day we’ll know
that other Hands can move mountains,
and plunge them into the sea.