Away On A Mountaintop

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All ears were hanging low
when the people of the earth
heard the news of her death
and of his rage.
Where the branches of the trees dipped
from fog shrouded peaks
and the tips of their waxy leaves
just brushed the pools among the rocks
where the water trickled
down to the lowlands,
she had passed rippleless
with her hopes in her hand.
Yes, there was many a heart rent asunder
in the time when word
ran rampant on the air,
borne aloft by voices
quavering and griefshrieking,
sobchoking whispered admittances
of things too true to be lies or delusions.
Upon the shoulders
of the behemoth of stone,
whose eyesunblinking
bore the sea
and the sky
and the land,
the girl who was apple to those eyes,
who brushed each petal
and who loved every pebble,
who wore sea foam off her shoulder
and who wrapped seaweed round each leg,
the nymph glimpsed on occasion
in tales wildly popularized
with the usual embellishments of circumstance
but with nothing unsaid untrue
about the nature of the gaze glimpsing back,
the lady of the lakes
where the lakes call their home,
her Dawn to his Be,
stepped lightly and eversure,
caught scent of the sea,
and eyes agate and agape
goggled breathlessly at the mist
that was the Breath of the Mountain
parting upon the paleness of the sun
and a bird winging there beside it.
Her feet that had flowed her over the rocks
found anchorage between two of them
and she was twisted in the air,
held in his grip of stone.
And not one eye closed in prayer
didn’t balloon outwards with tears
when, hand in hand,
they all listened in while the tale told true
of the one moment
that was left to the two of them.
The touch that they shared,
with all their hearts bared,
filled a moment to bursting
with the thirsting for life
in the strife of the moment
when all that touched teared.
For she was resplendent
with wreaths
of the sea and the sky,
tugging her gently
to make a wingless bird fly.
And the place of her birth,
where the sea met the earth,
held arms open in greeting
and waving her home.
And the moan in the stones
that ground as they groaned
flung skywards the flocks
from their nests in the rocks.
Her soul met his bones
in the snapping of stones
when the handsclasp handsnapped
and not a wing flapped
and windswept
she tumbled windblown.
Meek, humbled, and desolate,
the people of the earth wiped their tears
through the soot on their cheeks
as he blackened the sky
and made smoldering ruins of the land.
The sea beat her waves against him
but only his molten tears
fell hissing into her beseeching face.
Amid his roars and explosions,
she had fallen from his reach,
her eyes lost in the distance
as she was swallowed
by his smoke and his glare.