Come, tread the heights of Hellroaring, my friend;
look upon the vast expanse of mountain crags
marching crest on crest, an ocean’s waves
carved in stone by ice and snow, and mend
your finite self as they lend their strength.
Unmitigated power, condescending, begs
you stride the alpen tundra with little legs,
ever too short no matter their length.
Test your mettle, seek and find a sanity
absconded from the world of fragile minds
that hide in light and do not know their vanity.
Tread Hellroaring. Know but wind and silence.
Trade pride of soul for spirit-driven wind
and know the small expanse: your humanity.
—
To embrace and know the small is your quickening;
grasp as a babe for wanted, needed food,
find yourself a child where a man once stood.
Summit on summit, the mind reaches for infinity
and shadow dreams of future hope that we
can’t hope alone, no matter that we should,
while faltering creations we hold as highest good
and deny we are the great obscenity.
Can we hope, against hope, that rarefaction inspire?
That breath taken may yet give life to soul?
Can any hope abide when suffering’s cries
reverberate within that soul like thunder
on Hellroaring and return the echo of evil’s howl?
Will not a sane man demand the how, the why?
–For
Death is howling, allied Hell in outrage roars,
reaping, seething, flying high its ensigns,
primed for battle with its angels, men and engines.
Its banners furl and snap, in crimson soar
high above its ramparts slick with gore
where pitchmen ply all their trenchant
wit and wiles, trade in grand pretensions,
hawking like wares the brutalities of war.
But our metaphor is not of futility, of anguish:
the Lion of Judah, red in claw and tooth,
by freedom, hope, and truth alluring
each combatant, He loves, to thereby vanquish;
and with claws yet buried deep in the corpse of Death,
he stands in the gaping maw of Hell, roaring.