Mountains of Time

The mountains of this world are wearing away.
Wind-rounded sand turrets, rotten conglomerate
Cavern-riddled under fallen mountain peaks
Piled atop each other like a bucket filled
With children’s blocks.

Blue grey haze of digger pine and poison-oak
Around slime green seeps in shadowed canyons
Still sweltering under a stone-axe sun.
Deadly, unrelenting, pitiless.
Sun fire men drown in, now the summer
Heat makes the rivers rage cold.

Shattered rocks, abandoned wheels of iron,
Lions hunt the shadows, mephitic vapors rise
From old mine shafts. Mountains eaten through
Like fallen sparrows tunneled with maggots,
Now that the heat of summer has come.

Mountains laid low, rocky top covered 
With ash trees, wild cherry, butternut
Shoved over to bury the creeks, the stream
Gone forever, never again to flow under
Shaded cedar boughs, trout shadows 
Silted in, buried in mountain bones.

These are the mountains of greed
Mountains of grab all you can, grab the gold
Mountains inhabited by chained miners
Sad-eyed women strewn and broken along
Muddy streets, hungry children living in holes
While the man-created mountain rises pitiless.

Slaves in their mind-forged chains raise the ramparts
Higher, bastions of mud brick, rusting steel, spalling concrete.
The foundation cracks and crumbles even while the workmen
Raise the spire grasping for heaven.

All the mountains of the world are broken.
Shattered old schist, granite shard onion skin, 
crumbling burned out dragon fire scree,
Layers of river cobble lifted up and dumped
Onto unstable clay, clay on cobble, cobble on clay,
Until the whole mountain side gives way
Some impenetrable November three o’clock
When the rain has been lashing in sheets
For two darks and the giant old fir tree
By the abandoned post office
Blew down this morning.

Author: Duncan MacNae

Exiled Gael, scion of the Dust Bowl, dweller within Divine Grace, admirer of mountains, I have made my peace with trout and the starlings. Looking for a river and healing trees. duncanmacduncan5@gmail.com View all posts by Duncan MacNae