Everest

This is the first of a kind of 'transitional' period in my poems (maybe a fancy way of saying that for a few poems around here I'm not quite sure whether I wrote them in the first or second year of uni!). Seriously though, around this time I feel what I was writing was starting to mature somewhat...there was less pure unqualified melancholy, and more worthwhile reflection. I was beginning to get more out of the writing experience.

A fairly short and transparent poem, about overcoming life's obstacles. I took the liberty of throwing in a tiny snippet of family history too.

EVEREST

Life can be many things

And sometimes it’s a mountain

To be conquered, to be climbed

In a race against time.

There is danger everywhere

Hunger never far away

No choice but to carry on, and on you go

Fighting through that frost and snow.

In ’77 my father stood with a friend

On a frozen lake at the foot of the Khumbu icefall

Gazing in wonder, their tent unfurled

At the terrible slopes of the Roof of the World.

But I can’t see this roof

Though I feel it weighing down

As I struggle on blindly so far from the top

With a cold, lonely death if I once dare to stop.

I’ve been here far too long, I cannot know

How much longer I’m allowed to stay

And I can’t tell if up there someone’s counting

The footprints that I’ve made upon my mountain.

Thanks to: Miriam Stockley for Perfect Day, Seth Lakeman for The Charmer, and Foreigner for I Want To Know What Love Is.