The Exile’s Canvas
A silhouette of ash against the snow’s white psalm,
His breath a fragile hymn, his heart unsung,
Each step a dirge for visions none would know.
The mountain wore its silence like a crown,
A sovereign vast and pitiless in reign,
Where ice-etched crags tore at the bleeding sky
And winds, like furies, whispered of his name.
*Why climb?* the gales would mock in rasping tongues,
*What godless art could thaw this frosted hell?*
But still he pressed his palms to stone and ice,
A pilgrim to the shrine where shadows dwell.
In valleys far below, they’d scorned his hands—
Those hands that sketched the soul’s unuttered cries,
Had shaped the twilight’s melancholy hues,
Yet drew no gold from patrons’ gelid eyes.
*Too dark,* they hissed, *too raw, too full of wounds—*
*The world demands a sweeter, safer lie.*
So he had turned from hearths that held no light,
To seek the truth where mortal flames might die.
Through nights that hung like iron on his chest,
He carved his odyssey in frost and ache,
His pack held brushes stiff with frozen dreams,
His chalice ink, now black as starless lakes.
At last, a ledge—a stage above the clouds—
Where dawn’s first blush ignited diamond air.
He knelt, unrolled the vellum of his soul,
And loosed the tempest he had borne as prayer.
Stroke after stroke, a symphony in gray,
He painted all the silence tongues deny—
The weight of solitude, the ache of time,
The beauty lurking where all light goes sly.
The mountain watched, its ancient heart unmoved,
As crimson dripped from fingers split by cold.
*This,* he breathed, *is what I came to say—*
A manifesto writ in blood and gold.
But as the final glyph took form in ice,
A groan shuddered through the glacier’s core.
The ledge, his altar, trembled—then gave way,
And down he plunged where no scream echoes more.
Below, the village woke to sunlit hours,
To bread and gossip, markets, trivial wars.
No eye discerned the distant plume of snow
That swirled where art and exile merged as one.
The mountain kept his testament unseen,
A folio of frost none would retrieve.
Spring came, erasing every trace of ink,
As shadows sighed what words cannot conceive.
Some say the wind still hums his requiem—
A minor key that haunts the alpine void.
But mortals hear mere weather in its song,
And turn their collars up, annoyed.
