The mountains keep their secrets well—
in their silence, they bear the grief of stone,
the centuries pressed into stillness,
each stratum a tale of what once was
and what shall ever be.
One looks upon them and thinks,
they have never known what it is to fall.
But does one not hear them groan
beneath the weight of themselves,
the way they shift in the night
like old men turning in their slumber?

Each crack in the rock does whisper
of pressures unseen, tectonics
of ancient sorrows long since stilled.
In this, they are alike to us:
holding fast to the unspoken,
wearing their jagged edges
as though they have no need of gentleness.
But hark—does one hear it?

The way the wind grazes their faces,
how even the stone does yield to that
which is so soft it has no name.

We come to them burdened,
bearing the weight of days
like a sack of heavy stones,
each one a moment believed
to be the end of something vital.

We hold them close, believing
they are all we have—
these small griefs that anchor us
to the ground we tread upon.

But the mountains know
what we have not yet learned—
that every stone shall one day
become dust,
every peak worn smooth
by the selfsame wind
that now does caress the face.
We are not less for this,
nor are we more.

We are but the shape
life has taken to know itself,
to feel, in this brief span,
the vastness of what it means
to be.

Consider this:
the stars, too, shall perish,
and yet their light does wander
the corridors of space,
filling the night long after
they have burned themselves out.
We are no different.
What we are now, in this moment
of small sorrow, shall pass.

It is not the end,
but a whisper in the vastness

of what we are yet to become.
So let the mountains speak to us.

Let them tell how even they
must break and bow to time,
how their strength lies not in
holding firm, but in the slow
unfolding of their edges
to the universe's touch.

We are not small,
nor are we infinite.

We are the echo
of all that has ever been
and all that shall ever be.

Listen, and one shall hear
how the mountains weep
not because they are broken,
but because they are becoming.

                                                  And so are we.