Cold Mountain (Poetry)

Always there — on every dream’s horizon
the peak shines distant with its cap of snow
unscaleable and smug in isolation
it keeps its secrets even though I know
the key is where imagination found it —
truth penetrates the veils of mist around it.

So bare and cold — forbidding with good reason
perverse it beckons onwards like a goal
the shadows shift according to the season
but slopes remain too sheer for faith to hold
that summit rearing proud in white perfection
to kiss the passing clouds with faint affection.

I’ve scaled those heights in dreamspun watercolour
or hovered like a stormbird tossed on high
but still that awful whiteness stays untrodden
I’ve failed to scratch the glass it’s measured by
seen deathly — while my breath clouds winter’s mirror
and silence warns — reflects on frozen terror.

No earthly map can pin a firm location
carved from legend — coloured by belief
a fiction grown from half-crazed speculation
and nothing more — no footnote lurks beneath
explaining why such images persist
in times when wonder struggles to exist.