Hell, Roaring

Come, tread the heights of Hellroaring, my friend;

look upon the vast expanse of mountain crags

marching crest on crest, an ocean’s waves

carved in stone by ice and snow, and mend

your finite self as they lend their strength.

Unmitigated power, condescending, begs

you stride the alpen tundra with little legs,

ever too short no matter their length.

Test your mettle, seek and find a sanity

absconded from the world of fragile minds

that hide in light and do not know their vanity.

Tread Hellroaring. Know but wind and silence.

Trade pride of soul for spirit-driven wind

and know the small expanse: your humanity.

—

To embrace and know the small is your quickening;

grasp as a babe for wanted, needed food,

find yourself a child where a man once stood.

Summit on summit, the mind reaches for infinity

and shadow dreams of future hope that we

can’t hope alone, no matter that we should,

while faltering creations we hold as highest good

and deny we are the great obscenity.

Can we hope, against hope, that rarefaction inspire?

That breath taken may yet give life to soul?

Can any hope abide when suffering’s cries

reverberate within that soul like thunder

on Hellroaring and return the echo of evil’s howl?

Will not a sane man demand the how, the why?

–For

Death is howling, allied Hell in outrage roars,

reaping, seething, flying high its ensigns,

primed for battle with its angels, men and engines.

Its banners furl and snap, in crimson soar

high above its ramparts slick with gore

where pitchmen ply all their trenchant

wit and wiles, trade in grand pretensions,

hawking like wares the brutalities of war.

But our metaphor is not of futility, of anguish:

the Lion of Judah, red in claw and tooth,

by freedom, hope, and truth alluring

each combatant, He loves, to thereby vanquish;

and with claws yet buried deep in the corpse of Death,

he stands in the gaping maw of Hell, roaring.

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