Ascension

Ascension

And it loomed over the small town
In the middle of a desert of ice
A dark and menacing mountaintop
An intruder in earthly paradise

A greyed peak lost into the clouds
And sides of time-hardened snow
With the blackest rocks jutting out
And a tiny man dreaming below

‘Chomolangma’ they called her
‘The supreme goddess of the sky’
And such a formidable mountain
A wishful man dared to defy

Thirty thousand feet of untamed snow
Rooted in black and jagged stone
A sludgy mass of half-melted sleet
And a figure trudging along all alone

And the goddess threw in endless deceits
As he climbed towards her crown of ice
Sudden rocks that rolled down from above
Unexpected fissures in featureless precipice

And the weather gods weren’t amused
By the man who dared to challenge her
And troubled him with endless blizzards
And blinding lighting and deafening thunder

And he out climbed the unfriendly clouds
But that was about all he could stand
And the endless thick blanket below him
Smothered out sight of reassuring land

And his dream alone fuelled the man on
For his body had become exhausted and weak
And mostly crawling and almost limping
And the man was on the mountain peak

And as if to reward his colossal feat
The clouds cleared their precious keep
And beholding his breathtaking dream
The content man went into endless sleep

And thus a nameless man conquered the top
A triumph lost to the blind eyes of history
This is how the Everest came to be summitted
A thousand years before Norgay and Hillary
-Aditya MJ