Poem About Mountains: 4 Raw Feelings Before the Climb

Introduction

This poem about mountains comes from a writer who has never climbed one. It moves through four feelings in order comfort, wonder, fear, and nerve. It ends with a promise to go anyway.

I have never touched deep snow. I live in Nepal. Eight of the world’s fourteen highest peaks are here or on our border. I have only seen them on a screen. I wrote the first version of this poem about mountains in Nepali. Some of the lines were lost in the process of refining into English language. So I wrote it again from feeling, not from memory.

Here it is.

The Poem About Mountains: Before I Reach You

When the day has taken too much of me,
I open my phone and find you.
One white ridge on a small, bright screen,
and my sorrow gets smaller.

I have never touched snow that deep.
I don’t know how cold it bites,
how thin the air is,
how loud the quiet gets.
I only guess.
I guess it burns a little.
I guess it feels like waking up.
I press the screen to my cheek
and call it cold.

But what if you are bigger
than the dream I carry?
What if the air takes my breath
and the cold takes my name?
What if your anger finds me
before I learn your face?

I am afraid. I will go anyway.
The road is long,
and my boots are still new.
But I am the traveler,
and one day I will stand in your snow
and finally know.

What This Poem About Mountains Means

I wrote this poem about mountains during Dashain. It is the biggest festival in Nepal. I had made plans to travel. Then the weather changed all of a sudden. I did not get permission to go.

I was in sorrow. The quietness was huge. The emptiness was huge too. It felt like longing for something I can see from the roof of my home, but cannot touch. I can even feel the cold wind that comes from it. More of this feeling is in my poems about longing.

But I was in a dilemma. Is this cold from the mountains, or is it just the weather? I don’t know. So I ask myself every day. Is the mountain bigger than my dream? What if the air takes my breath? What if the cold snow knows my patience and my name? I wrote about this fear in my poem about fear too.

And then my last, sudden nerve says, go. Take a step. Be there. It will wait for you. It will take good care of you.

This poem about mountains does not mean I can’t be there. I will be. Maybe in the future. Maybe in just a few days.

The poem starts on a tired day. The speaker opens her phone and finds a white ridge. Her sorrow shrinks.

I did not say what hurt her. I think most of us know this moment. We look at something big and quiet, and our own trouble gets smaller. You can find more of this feeling in my poems about longing.

A Small Detail About the Phone In the second part, she presses the phone to her cheek and calls it cold. A phone is warm. She knows that. She says cold anyway. That small lie shows how much she wants to know the real thing.

Your Turn

Think of a place you love but have never reached.

Write three lines about it. Say one thing you do not know. Then say you will go.

Which place are you waiting to reach? Tell me in the comments.