How to write a poem about a mountain

On the ridge we stop to catch ourselves, leaning
against crags to view the drop. You tell me how you envy
my sweeping vistas, my heritage of paths that cut
clean through wind. I shush your maundering

and press on before the light collapses. ’I spend my days,’
I say, ‘In the biblical shadow of this thing. Don’t ask me
to tell its shape. I have no stomach for scale.
The mountain sorts me like moraine, the paths

are all eroded into platitude and there are faults,
always threatening tremors. I am dizzy
from its wind systems, scoured thin by cloud.’
I leave a silence billowing. Further down,

I sit to fumble some intrusion from my shoe.
A shard of stone, no bigger than a thought, its ridged face
cutting like some old lover, like a baby or
an old preacher drumming something that irks

like a worn out song. Slipped in my pocket
it still insists, indents soft flesh. I walk on
muttering. My stride is good. If I keep going
the retort might accumulate some mass.

Rhian Thomas grew up in North Wales and now lives in Gloucestershire. Her work has been published by Honno, Planet, Poetry Wales and Steel Jackdaw. She was shortlisted for the 2022 Laurie Lee Prize.