Resilience

What stability remains

When even mountains waver?

When sanity crumbles in staccato stutters,

Razing cliffs and levelling ridges

In urgent avalanches,

Desperately barrelling toward the beyond below?

 

Robbing spiralling peaks

Of ancient candyfloss crowns

So that their bare bones may be whipped

By searing surges

Of rarefied air,

Locked in an eternal tug-of-war

Raw and frost-bitten,

Cold and exposed.

 

What stability remains

When fault lines plot their demolition

Branching out in violent fissures,

Threatening the very foundations

Of entire millennia

of slow and steady growth?

 

Though mountains never crumble,

They shed granite skins

In seizures of rockfalls

& ice-snow tsunamis.

 

Only to reveal

Fresh faces beneath,

Ready to stave off the onslaught

of ferocious gales & nuclear quakes

Despite having never

Encountered the elements,

Or known their rabid violence.

 

Though these gusts

May strip you of your Self

What lies beneath

Is stronger than you know.

Stand firm

For you are built from aeons

Of vortexes and asteroids.

 

When mortal struggles threaten

To shatter you to shards

Remain resolute –

Everest was carved

From the same stone as you.