Mountains

It doesn't take a great mountain to inspire a person, though a few great mountains certainly take prominence in our stories: Ararat, Sinai, Everest, the four mountains of the Navajo mythology, etc. Several years ago I lived for a brief while in Jerusalem during the winter. The ancient city in wintertime can be bleak: most buildings are made from the same monochromatic materials (Jerusalem stone), and the gray skies do little to lighten up the mood. At the beginning of springtime I headed out of the city, picking at random to visit a small town named Bet She'an. In this town there was a small tel (hill), which when you reached the top, gave with a surprise an expansive view of the verdant, flowering Israeli countryside. After that Jerusalem winter (which I endured with a miserable and long-lasting cold), that view changed my perspective on things.

So here's a couple poems on the theme of mountains:

The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain

There it was, word for word,
The poem that took the place of a mountain.

He breathed its oxygen,
Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table.

It reminded him how he had needed
A place to go to in his own direction,

How he had recomposed the pines,
Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds,

For the outlook that would be right,
Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion:

The exact rock where his inexactness
Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged,

Where he could lie and, gazing down at the sea,
Recognize his unique and solitary home.

--Wallace Stevens

High Up on Suilven

Gulfs of blue air, two lochs like spectacles,
A frog (this height) and Harris in the sky--
There are more reasons for hills
Than being steep and reaching only sky.

Meeting the cliff face, the American wind
Stands up on end: chute going the wrong way.
Nine ravens play with it and
Go up and down its lift half the long day.

Reasons for them? the hill's one ... A web like this
Has a thread that goes beyond the possible;
The old spider outside space
Runs down it - and where's raven? Or where's hill?

--Norman MacCaig