What Do Mountains Say Poem by Ayan Dasgupta

What do mountains say in the middle of the night?
Those shrouded chroniclers of obscurity
With words murmured in cold whispers
Drawn into their stony self?

What do mountains say in the middle of the night?
Things that shouldn’t be spoken of?
Centuries of wear and tear,
Decades of blood and sweat,
Broken oaths – Lost glory – the damnation
And faith regained?
Or perhaps, just silence?

Apparitions they are –
Undead, steadfast and dark;
Raconteurs of the night,
Remnants
Of entire civilization washed out,
Entire wisdom lost and found;
Bystanders in apocalypses,
Reincarnations,
The Karma cycle – heaven and hell...

What if it isn’t so?
What if,
From its jagged contour
There’s just a precipitous flight
To the rocks down below?
And on the topmost ridge
Where it meets the darkness
The stars come down to kiss its head?

There it stands, as if calling us
Not out of any maddening drive for the unknown,
A cloak-and-dagger desire to slay our surreptitious selves
Or human vagueness of any sort;
But forever there it stands
Waiting for us outside the closet of convictions -
A thousand years of futile wisdom;
Bespectacled
Resolute
And silent
With a revealing hush in those gravels of time…

What do mountains say in the middle of the night?
Neither annals of achievements
Nor misgivings and sorrow
For what we couldn’t do
Or never did possess,
But words unexpected from anyone else –
Anyone less silent and cold than the mountains of the night