Wild Moment: John Pearce

"Too soon, like you, we’ll be grits and muddy remnants..." Read a love poem for Ben Hope and Ben Klibreck

Northern Munros

You two, silent shapes of millennia lie basking in our awe,
Burnt dry by spinning sun, worn by ageless ice and thaw,
As we two, begin our long, slow climb in summit lust.
Buoyed on your writhing rock, layered in timeworn dust.

You, standing stones, testimony to the persistence of being.
We, shifting silhouettes, echoing ancestral seeing.
You, grindstoned, dumb waiters, deaf to our booted tinkling,
We, waking human sculptures, learning, talking, thinking.

All four, eroded from our former shapes,
You from searing magma, we from tumbling apes.

All four, in majesty and detritus from unnumbered years,
Wind howled, drenched, and hallowed by water’s tears.
We share a long, steep, and slow way down
Perpetual, eventual, with everything we own,
A sad descent, to beach, to sand and sea,
Each for nought and everything.  
We just are, we be.
 
On reaching the trig of inspiration, we two gaze below.
We pause, smile and suddenly come to know.

Too soon, like you, we’ll be grits and muddy remnants.
No more worn-down pride and glory in your epic fragments,
But scattered on some slope or boxed in our designated spaces.
No longer straining eyes and ears for echoes in your blank faces.
Who cares now what our ancestors say?
Laughing, wiping tearful eyes and watching imagination run away.
We turn, embrace and thank our fellow traveller
For helping us along to find this way.


©John Pearce, February 2021

Above: Pippa Manson on summit of Ben Hope by John Pearce

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