Ascent (Poem)

The castle itself you couldn't quite make out,

nestled and jutting from the dark spine halfway up the mountain.

Formidable, hidden and looming came to mind

as my feet crunched up the half-hour's walk of beat down snow

and red pines rising a hundred feet straight up,

sentinels to my solitude.

People chattered, pushed, slid and wrenched their ways

incongruously up the path,

anomalies on my landscape,

mistakes from a painter's unsteady hand.

They were headed to this fortress,

hunched on a rock hundreds of meters ahead,

yet seemed to make no progress, while I,

smoothly and almost sanguinely

glided further up to where an entryway stood with its gaping jaw open.

Strangely though,

where once there had been freedom to pass

a guard now protected the blackness behind.

Was this predictable?

Did this now match the protests of a few girls,

who had somehow made it to the top unseen by me?

Who now stepped forward to force a pass

and were punched downwards by the guard,

crumpled to the snow.

He seemed unfazed, powerfully old

and I crunched closer only to realize he had no eyes.

More closely now,

surrounded now by towers soaring into the Bavarian sky.

He still had made no move to block me

and I passed within a panicked inch,

near enough to smell the strength taken from those he had finished.

Suddenly, surprisingly, simply,

I was inside. I was alone.

A stillness descended down upon me like a play's curtain

and I turned to see the guard,

now facing me,

his back to a sunlight that punched its way

around his shoulders yet never reached me,

silhouetting his eyeless face.

I turned quickly,

and began ascending the stairs smothered in silence.