Mountain Home

‘You will travel north,’ the seer said,

‘to a bay in the great ocean.

If you look at the water, then turn

one hundred and eighty degrees,

you will face a strange-shaped mountain.

That will be the place of your home —

your new, your real, your destined home.’

And so it was to be, but first I came

just for a visit. My friend who lived here said,

‘There’s someone special I’ll take you to see.

Now close your eyes. Don’t open them

till I say.’ She wanted to drive me past the sign

that said Mt Warning. I opened my eyes only

when we reached the foot of the slope.

We climbed just a little way, enough for me

to meet the trees and the brush turkeys

and talk to the mountain herself. Tell me

all you like that the energy’s male. I say

it changes to masculine near the top. I spoke

with a Goddess that day, and all the other days.

I’ve never reached the top. I have no need.

I had met this mountain before, in meditations

when I lived far from here. I traversed in thought

her deep crystal pathways; discovered secrets.

‘She calls you,’ people told us when we moved

up from Melbourne to live in her vast Caldera. 

‘Some she calls; others she spits out.’

I’ve seen that too. I don’t believe I’m one.

Eighteen years have passed quickly.

She has hosted Reiki Master initiations,

meditation groups, channellings,

and many solitary walks on her lower slopes

as well as presiding over Pagan rites.

She has moved me around her valleys,

a few years here or there, where I am needed.

But never too far from my source.

Now I’m close in, the closest I’ve been.

I’m told I have come to rest in my final home.

And it suits me. I walk out every day

and look at a ring of mountains, most of all

that great, strange-shaped mountain I belong to.

It began as seduction and became a marriage.

30 Poems in 30 Days: 7, a relationship with an inanimate object.