A breeze threaded the eye of my sleep.
It was enough to rustle me out of the warmth,
enough to prove dawn
couldn’t arrive with me in my tent,
with only a few stunted trees,
and lichen and rocks as witnesses.
To be splendid, the sun
needed me to rise.
The clouds, tinged with purple and pink,
the ones that buried the towns
and the lowlands, and the sound
to the east in their lava,
the ones that filled basins and valleys below,
needed to be seen.
Across gulfs of white, the whole of existence was betrayed
as an archipelago of ridges.
I scanned the spines of the pinnacles nearby
for signs of my kind.
The silent volcanoes on the horizon
stood as sentinels in the distance,
with the exquisite stitches that connected us like waves
always on the verge of breaking
Image: Photo provided by the author
- Sentry on Mount Townsend - November 15, 2022