Mountains

I was a child of the quiet suburban streets

forever filled with warmth

in my memory.

On one side, the busy network of roads

pumping life to our neighborhood

and back again;

on the other side, the desert,

my desert, 

extending to the mountains

that held their secrets far above

my head.

My past is a story full of 

mistakes and regrets;

I was glad to escape elementary school,

glad to be rid of middle school,

and in all the gladness of these

necessary endings

we left that drowsy, melancholy house,

removing any attachment

that might have lifted it above

all other houses in my mind.

So I became a teenager of the city.

This house is an island of sanity

in the middle of the rainbow weavings

of cultures.  I traded

the narrow-mindedness of my birthplace

for the boundless acceptance

of my second life.

But still,

I cannot see my mountains

through the haze of dust and smog 

that falls like a widow's veil

over the land.

The sounds are harsher here, the smells

less vague, more insistent.

The song, though, is the same.

I can still hear the patient rhythm

of the earth itself, bound under buildings

and laced with concrete and roads.

And when I sit in my room

in the dead of night, the rhythm

brings me back to the days

when I lay on my stomach

and hugged the land itself to me,

staring at the purple beauty

of the sun-touched mountains

against the sky.