Mountains

*A very rough-draft of a poem*

Mountains:

The mountains felt like walls when I arrived in Utah ten years ago.

Closing me into the small valley the stony faces confined me to a foreign land.

The gray fortresses, so different from the green fields I knew, were my isolated tower.

Here, hidden in the valley I was both trapped and protected–

trapped in a new life I didn’t ask for,

and protected from the old life I escaped.

The rough surfaces changed with the seasons-

reflecting the passage of time like a calendar’s pages:

green in summer, brown in fall,  and white in winter-

as the surfaces changed so did I.

The walls that defined my space echoed my mind.

As the years passed I was no longer unnerved by the sentinels’ presence,

I was disquieted by their absence.