Endurance

The sky, hugely dishevelled with bruised,
ragged clouds, wind whirling a high altitude
finally carries them off to release their
torrents elsewhere, leaving the valley without
its blast-furnace intermediary, the sun finally
blazing its long fingers of hydrogen radiation
baking all that lies below in a ferociously resolute
gathering of oppressively stifling heat to
dominate the mountain landscape.

The mountain stream embracing the stony
fissures that have carried it down the
mountainside for aeons, from the arid steam
of boiling contact, entices birds and insects to
its cool spray rapidly evaporating through
its passage, constantly renewed. Overhanging
trees, tenaciously clinging with shallow roots
to sparse soil embedded in bedrock, respire
and add restorative, inadequate shade
to relieve heat-exhausted wildlife.

Immense granite boulders, elephantine
in colour and size, long since tumbled in an
ancient rockslide, rest massively on the
granite ledges of the mountainside. Huge
fallen trunks bridge the gap from stream to
rocky bank. A northern thrush sings its
faith in tomorrow. The heat, intense in its
fiery fervour, meeting the stream, sends
vapour rising in a shimmer of distorting
waves of fantasized mountain imagery.