You Are My Mountain

Loved from afar, carried in dreams

I love you
as I love the mountains
on a distant horizon

I can’t live on them
But I can love them from afar

I can touch them only briefly
but not rest with them forever

Such is our fate
To be admired from far away
To remember an embrace

To live in the memories we once shared

I can’t take you home with me. Nor you me. Just as I cannot take a mountain home

Perhaps you are too big for my heart. Too big for the regularity of my life

You are a mountain that appears only above the clouds. In dreams and mists

So powerful on my heart

I could freeze.
Limbs could fall.
I could plunge into frozen depths

If I died on your slopes, dreaming of your warm beating heart, your gentle smile, your mischievous laugh

Perhaps my happiness, our moments, would freeze in eternity

I mourn that mountain life that could have been
One I’ll never know

You are my mountain
Too big for my life

But I’ll never stop peering at the horizon
At the peaks
So far beyond my grasp

That mountain
is you

A poem by Pemba Umoja