April 23, 2017What the Mountains Are Silent About
In Chechnya, you can watch the Greater
Caucasus Mountains rise queerly along
the southern border, like a man newly gone
from this place—disappeared for wanting
wrongly. Some might say his wings are snowcapped
peaks, but I don’t believe in angels
or heaven, so I wonder if those mountains
aren’t just piles of ash. And if they could
speak to us, would it be in a low whistle
that shivers pine needles like limbs bound
and trembling from the electrical current
pulsing through them? Would they scream,
the kind that musters all its breath from
the tenderized flesh of a violet bruise or
the space where bone fractures into sharp
shards of what once held his body together?
Listen. You can hear his pained cry in your
own closeted dreams. You know the weight
of these mountains, you’ve always been here
holding your truth deep within like a flesh of
Paleogene rock because if you made a sound,
they’d come for you, they’d make you crumble.
from Poets Respond