An Ode to Kilimanjaro

An Ode to
Kilimanjaro

What joy
in Everest, in K2,
mounts of this kind
when they merely build on
peaks around, the gradual incline?

O
Kilimanjaro
Thou massif supreme
Who rise head and shoulders
Above the Savannah surrounding
With wildebeest grazing golden greens
At your feet; rising up through woolly clouds
To heights ice covered, at Equator nature’s oxymoron

Making
Viewers giddy
With a sense sublime
Towering over the Black
Lording in your pristine White
The truest of nature, not a self-
Proclaimed Superior Foreign Light.

Your
Naked
Individuality
All glory your own
You need no PR, No
ladders on which to climb
Smacking of arrogance from
Your Solitary Throne, you do not
Conform, you are not conditioned
You rise, You rise; Your rise oblivious
Of the rest, you stare the Andes, Atlas, Alps and
Himalaya in their eyes, you see your own visions all alone
For you, O greater than Helicon and Vesuvius, the poets mind
Unique inspirations, sights, your own new kens, your own paradigms


7th of February, in the class after the Wordsworth one, where his encounter in the Prelude with trailing peaks was discussed.