Climbers

This earth is bound by natural law
And must conform to the pressure of time.
Shaped to a globe by other powers,
Leveled by forces all around,
It retreats into a ball, curls in
Upon itself, retains no heights
Save those few peaks that rise above
The mass and, unconsenting, are slowly
Leveled by universal grinding.
That is ever nature’s law.

As with the seen, so with the unseen:
The energy of things is spent
Toward eternal stillness. Every
Motion serves to level mass.
In all this world, no single spark
May be reclaimed, but all are lost,
Yes, even those few fires, spawned
In deeper times, that serve to light
The dark and, unconsenting, are smothered
Down in universal dust.

That too is nature’s law. And must be:
Mass is the universe’s body,
Energy is its soul. To level
The body and smother the soul is ever
Nature’s way. But it is not ours.
And though the universe someday
Will take us back into its body,
The soul has power to resist.
For nature may finally snuff the soul
with the body, but cannot smother it.

Only we command our soul,
Whatever pressure of time surrounds us.
We resist and, unconsenting,
Rise like fire and, in our rising,
Light the universal night.
Our world is not a globe, but a cone:
A peak that, unconsenting, rises
From the universal sphere
As peaks rise from the rounded earth:
Unconquered, not unconquerable.

We'll not be balked at any level --
Cease, content or discontent,
To rise -- for this unites us all:
We are, and must be, climbers. Not that
All will choose to climb, but that
For all the peak is always there.
And in the universal night
We are the torches that, afar,
One sees, like twinkling unspent stars,
Upon a mountain, burning bright.