Through and Past

Yesterday, a Sherpa died.

In the coldest winter of the decade in Nepal,

the rocks were loose

and slipping,

and he fell.

Somewhere above the thin clouds,

which may just have been the anxious breaths

of his mother who waited

in his small village below,

he would never be found - 

and the funeral would be slow to come,

and his mother would wait to mourn him,

for she knew that at the peak

he liked to wait a while longer - 

for nowhere else but there

was everything so close - 

a sky that could be looked through and past,

every single moment to ever have happened, 

every birth, death, great war, and first love

below him,

and above him only the face of God

close enough to be touched - 

how to leave such a thing behind?

how to climb back down to fellow people

From a height where even the call of a mother's love

might only come as broken whispers?

If he had died, it was just to stay that while longer,

among a wind that would say things he had never heard before,

and in the evening, carry his footprints home.