Rocky Mountain
No possibility of reaching the top
that day—or ever. I was nothing
to it.
I sat in the car, but it was too soft
a shield against the unbearable, in-
human god-thing.
I sat looking up, up the mountain,
longing for blindness. A climber’s
sterner stuff.
A climber would have yearned
to ascend, conquer. I yearned
to flee, or free-
fall to the base of the true God,
to whom I was, oddly, something
worth dying for.
Johanna Caton, O.S.B, is a Benedictine nun of Minster Abbey, in Kent, England. Her poems have appeared in The Christian Century, St Austin Review, Ekphrastic Review, Amethyst Review, One Art, Today’s American Catholic, Fathom, Fare Forward, Windhover, The Catholic Poetry Room, and other publications. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee.
Amethyst Review 