Climbing Kuwohi Alone
A Solitary Hiking Ascent Through Grief
All morning I climbed through oaks,
losing count of myself.
Somewhere below, a voice I used to trust
had said this would help.
I am still deciding whether that was true.
π₯Ύ
Above a certain elevation, grief
runs out of room to be large.
I have carried mine this high before,
and stood on quartzite so long undisturbed
it has forgotten every century since its own making.
ποΈ
I put my hand on it
and felt nothing answer,
and did not ask it to.
A bear had come through at dawn.
I could tell by what was driven into the mud,
going about its life with no thought
of anyone else's.
I have always loved that about bears.
π»
On Kuwohi I stood so long my legs
began to belong to something else.
Carolina spread below into a distance
that holds no opinion of anyone standing above it.
π
Spruce stood dead and bone-bare among spruce still living,
and I could not tell from where I stood
which ones still believed in continuing.
It did not seem to matter to either.
π²
What I came to leave, I left.
I am not certain where exactly,
somewhere between one rock and another
on a mountain that will still be standing
after my name has gone from every mouth that held it.
π§
That is all I needed to know,
and I did not know it
until I was already going down.
About the Creator
Tim Carmichael
I am an Appalachian poet and cookbook author. I write about rural life, family, and the places I grew up around. My poetry and essays have appeared in Beautiful and Brutal Things, My latest book. Check it out on Amazon
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Babbling Dixie
The short form of tomorrow is never the whole story. Abbreviations mean nothing when we are born to die and we all are aren't we? Being spoken for before birth is something we're not supposed to remember like some kind of karma after effect. Still here we are spending our lives looking for each other.
By Canuck Scriber Lisa Lachapelle3 days ago in Fiction
Comments (2)
A beautiful description of the journey we must go on to move through grief. ππβ¨
βCarolina spread below into a distanceβ gut-punched this Carolina girl(best in the world). I love the idea of hiking through grief to literally rise above it and gain perspective. As always, your words carry more weight than the dictionary credits them.