By Arwin Shams Siddiquee

---

There’s something in the mountains,

Like the music on Saki’s hill, ringing golden laughter

that beguiles intruders, trespassers, 

those who would encroach on sacred ground.

Intruders—the rumbling of a thousand boots stomping

to the beat of a hundred drums of war, banging in unison, in silence

unlike the old days, when wars were fought in the open–

who march on into thickets of bamboo and teak.

Raised voices–angry, alien–join the cacophony, birthing dissonance,

a polytonal nightmare, orchestral in scale; loathsome, unfeeling.

And over the drone of a hundred hundred crackling fires they blare,

they drown out the music

of babbling brooks, children’s laughter, birdsong,

of a tranquility that they will never know.

But there is Something in the mountains.

Something that–like Confucius on the Tai Shan–stands in solemnitude, feeling

“the smallness of the world below” as Tietjens said.

Something that a million combat boots cannot trample,

Something that a hundred million bullets cannot pierce,

Something that will haunt us for our sins long after

the brooks, the birdsong, the children’s laughter have died out,

long after our brick-and-mortar edifices have replaced the last vestiges of those that lived on and

off this land, these mountains.

There’s something in the mountains that cannot die.