To your mothers who wear the khata

We have little morning and sugar;
black tea lines our stomachs
heavy with tsamba; ahead, gelid graves.
 
Behind, Nima’s ear is crying;
he knows not to ignore it.
Faithful guides, headlamps gutter
 
in rarefied air; our charge a
canister of compressed gas,
artificial carnations, sleeping bags,
 
a densely-woven yak’s-wool rug,
ropes, ice anchors and snow shovels,
twenty-eight children’s fathers.
 
Alive, I would describe the sound as the
twang of a terrific subterranean string.
Now, I cannot place it.
 
I reflect on language, harness its power:
gargantuan, from the large-mouthed giant;
like cows, mountains calve.
 
Numb meat, cook’s hand protrudes;
his thumb worn by the strands he wove
while planning the house he would build
 
for his wife and daughters. Heart preserved,
frozen beneath the Golden Gate,
they cannot honor his hostile tomb.
 
Lanced of her proud tumor,
Sagarmatha fingers her new crevasses,
sighs and settles her dead; above
 
griffons and prayers to goddess
sweep frigid columns, the shattered serac,
colossal weight of a silent cataclysm.
 
 
(In memory of the sixteen Nepalese guides that lost their lives in an avalanche on Mount Everest on 18 April 2014.)
 
Published in The Dawntreader (UK), spring issue, 2016.