The mountain swooned in its strangeness,

storm above pink in celestial tension.

 

How I’d like to be buried here,

I thought,

unsteady but rooted in natural chaos.

 

To have spent a lifetime trying to control it,

taming passions and longings,

 

feuding with ecstatic idiocy.

 

To know love might transcend elements,

cut through cascades of loss.

 

Once in the earth, we remember

being unremembered and the mountain

swoons onward,

 

shining with unchanging immanence,

like a god.

Morgan L. Ventura is a Belfast-based poet and writer. Poems appear in Poetry Ireland Review, Banshee, and Southword, among others, while essays can be found in Al Jazeera, Geist, and Best Canadian Essays 2021. Shortlisted for the 2023 Listowel Writers’ Week Poetry Collection Award, Ventura holds an MA in Poetry from the Seamus Heaney Centre and PhD from the University of Chicago.

 

 

Main photograph by David Street.