Climbing Mountains Is Stupid
The beginning and end of poetry?
Climbing mountains is stupid, the work of a clown. Every mountain I climb I must then climb down.
Working so very hard for the things I have bought. They may be here today, tomorrow they may not.
I’ll be the very best. I’ll be a record-setter. But in the news tomorrow there will be one better.
Is there a heaven for which I am trying? Is there a heaven for which I am dying?
That is the very first poem I ever wrote. I wrote it for an assignment in either sophomore or junior English class in high school a hundred years ago. It took me about ten minutes to write.
I went to a very large high school (around 4,000 students). Like all high schools, this one had numerous cliques. One of the smaller cliques consisted of students who always carried bibles with them everywhere they went. While other students were taking smoke breaks, these students were taking bible breaks. They would gather together in a hand-holding circle while one of them read aloud some passage from the bible. And then, heaven forbid, they would start singing!
We called them the Jesus Freaks. On more than a few occasions I would make disparaging remarks about them.
But truth be told, I was not that different from them — except I never sang and I was a clique of one. Instead of a bible, I carried around with me a tattered copy of the Tao te Ching, the classic work of Taoism. I read passages from it throughout my day. It was one of my greatest inspirations.
My poem was subtly influenced by my immersion in Taoism as well as my aversion to Christianity. It well defined my teenage angst and the beginnings of my quest for understanding of the world I was entering.
I was hugely disappointed when the English teacher gave my poem a D. “It was too morose,” she said. I could easily have given up poetry forever at that point but then something happened….
A really cute girl in my English class asked me if she could read my poem. I gave it to her and after reading it her eyes bugged out and she proclaimed, “Wow! That was really, really good!”
And that is all it took! I instantaneously became a poet.
For the next three or four years I wrote a lot of poetry. A lot. Sadly, no subsequent poem that I wrote was as good as that first one — at least not in my eyes. I finally quit writing poetry on a beautiful spring day during my freshman year in college. That was the day when I said to myself, “Fuck poetry! I’m going to write novels!” I never wrote poetry again.
None of those poems still exist. Every single one of them were slowly fed, one by one, into a bonfire. (I used to do that a lot back then.) That first poem, however, still exists because it is forever etched into my noggin. It was the only poem that survived the bonfires. There is just no way I can forget it. It is hopelessly memorized.
Morose? I don’t think so. Over the years, whenever I recite it to myself in my head I am quickly brought back into the NOW, the present, the Tao. It never fails to uplift me. It pulls me out of the mental hamster wheel of living that I repeatedly find myself trapped in. One reading of that poem and I am free — at least for a little while.
I still have that tattered old copy of the Tao te Ching. It is the one item that has been in my possession longer than any other. I almost never read it anymore, though, just as I never write poetry anymore (with just a few exceptions).
Can I do it again? Can I write poetry? I don’t know. Maybe I’ll give it a try. If only I could shut up long enough to write one….
(This piece is dedicated to Mike Essig )
Copyright by White Feather. All Rights Reserved. You are invited to read my short story, Remembering Alimaka