Published May 15th, 2025
Poetry Contest #22 – First Place
by Erica Acuzar
When I was younger,
I bathed in the sublime.
I come back to these moments
When I have the time.
Of stratified mountain range
Perspired in morning,
Glassy filaments lined the trails of your path.
I memorized your touch.
I memorized your wrath.
I laid rest in your valleys
My spirit submerged in your depths
Where salt stream suffuses
Veined fissures of our past.
The longer I stayed the more I could feel
The night start to inhale me.
Your earth entering my marrow
To finally claim me.
I suffered in your repose.
And I made myself empty so you could enclose.
No one talks of the vertigo afflicted
At these deafening altitudes.
The scraped fingertips
And muddied knees,
In futile foraging for yesterday's flower.
And yet we all understand that,
However burred and bitter,
It is not the grove nor the plains,
But the trees that give us life.
So when I straddled your peak
Under coniferous shower,
Where air is lithium mesh,
With flora and thorn imbued in my flesh,
Pulse drumming and rattled
Wrists sharpened by nettle
I prayed to the gods
That the dust never settle.
Please let me suffer this all the days of my life.
Let me live in this love that only causes me strife.
Let this fervent desire continue to subsume me.
Let this mountainous bedrock finally consume me.
But
All those who climb know that eventually you must descend.
One way or another,
The mountain will spit you out.
He does that to lovers who are most devout.
Since then I have moved to a pasture
Lined with maple and birch
Where I wake to the sound of hummingbirds,
The smell of magnolia
Where it is beautiful and bare.
But sometimes
I still find myself longing
for that mountainous air.
About the Poet
Erica Acuzar resides in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.
Read the poet's biography on Erica Acuzar's Artist Page.
Next in Wax Mag #7:
Summering
Haiku Suite by Monica Kakkar
Back to Wax Mag #7
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