Is the mountain still too steep?
I think not, my step is light.
Can I see the peak from here?
Does it really matter?
T
he scene below breath-taking!
The climb lifts me to a different height.
Have I reached the top?
Who can tell?
Not I!
Is this the peak I searched for?
Or has the perspective changed the shape?
How can I know?
Do I need to?
The importance is the journey.
This one done.
This one finally complete.
Do I need to tread this way again,
Or seek this path,
Or brave these rocky crags?
No, I think not,
But there are other peaks
With other views,
With different ends,
With easier tracks,
Or harder.
From here the possibilities expand,
To tread a thousand peaks,
And tracks and rocks and valleys.
The challenges forever there,
But I can choose this route,
Or that.
Never again?
Finally?
Well that matters not at all.
The journey beckons,
The adventure, the exploration,
And they will always call.
And if the path leads to the top then …
So it will.
For Dee
(Later addition ... the power of the internet - this poem brought Mortimer back to us ... see his comment ... my blog is worthwhile after all ...)
10 comments:
Thanks - good one. There is more, so much more in my mind. It taking time to surface.
I don't want to add to your poem. It is good - very good. It speaks to me as I was, but I have changed in ways it is hard to explain right now - except in these thoughts which were prompted by one single line.
Is this the peak I searched for? ...
When I arrived I found I had reached a higher peak, so much higher, that I have been searching for all my life. There are other peaks, other views but none will matter quite so much as this, for what I have find here is the key to who I am. All questions, all roads seem to converge to this one single place...
You are right of course. It is not me as I was but me as I am now. Even before I reached this peak I was considering the new direction to take. The journey must go on...
The last line of verse one reflected the feeling I got that you had reached a higher plane.
As I look back, I see several points of convergence during my life. Some I was not aware of until later. Some I felt acutely aware of.
The poem, although inadequate, sprang instantly to mind. The analogy equally instant, I could even see the "summit" on Skiddaw as I wrote it and the surrounding valleys and peaks.
I like that analogy. I wrote the last comment at about 3am. Later I wrote more in 'The journey'
"The pain is gone!!! All my life I have lived with this pain; as long as I can remember. It was not a physical pain but a mental one which ate into my soul. I did not think of it as a pain. It was normal. It was what I was. My first memory of it was when I was very little but already the feeling was familiar, a gaping hole which would open up each someone spoke to me, swallowing every word in my mind; stealing every thought each time I was expected to give an answer... The pain was always there often no more than an irritation, yet always threatening to open out into a great bottomless pit. In time I learned to live with it; to balance a plank over that aching void and walk, totteringly, across. In time I hardly noticed the void, it was so normal and the balancing act just part of my life. It is only now, when the pain is gone that I find myself shocked by its absence..."
Somehow the mountains and mountain peaks and the journey and views from them or towards them so speaks to us in life's turmoils. I paint and write about mountains in my column in the paper but never have I been able to do it so elegantly as this poem.
This is a poem to come back to again and again and again and still it will not lose its powers to make us refelct on life and its challenges.
I agree with Trine. Far from inadequate this is a poem to come back to again and again - each time with a new vista to offer...
And here I am again. Still loving this poem. Wondering and hoping that all relating to it has either less melankolia or are handling it better.
Hello Mick and Kath,
Is this the peak I searched for?
Rings a very loud bell after major heart surgery.
I have lost your e-mail address and postal address.
Cheers,
Mortimer.
Oh Mortimer! I'll email you. I'm glad you found my blog.
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