Random Acts of Poetry

Random Acts of Poetry

Hiking Down

A mountain tilts beneath his feet,
falling to a stilled turmoil of glacial rock--
layers of millennia cracked
by insidious weeds and grasses.
He is tired of hills,

their indifference to aching calves.
He follows the wind to a jagged field,
where it sets the shrubs to shaking,
shrugging, before they straighten again,
slowly, in silence. He rests.

Here, the sky's blue compassion
is marred by a single puff,
a whitish mold sent by the city.
It drags a shadow, a memory,
a momentary grief that chills and passes.

The hovering mountaintops are beyond him.
He would rather contemplate
each weed, each pebble that frames his boot,
untroubled by enormity,
the catalogue of obstacles.