Mountain

Everest eats people:
The glacier cracks a hundred metres deep
swallow the climbers that slip like flies
to the pitch white throat. It chews them down
then spits them out centuries later, still fresh,
their flesh just slightly mulched and brown.

Yet Himalaya's tourists convey themselves up pre-fixed ropes
wheezing thick air through gas masks
safely wrapped in North Face insulated clothes,
trudging upwards in procession - multitudinous droves.

K2 once shed a house of rock where guidance ropes
were hitched. Two dozen novice mountaineers
stranded in the death zone's hell.
One by one they chanced the cliff,
some lived, some froze, some fell.

All this waste to say
'I conquered the tallest mountains there to climb.'
By pulling hand over hand on rope, following a line.