Am I Thus Soiled

Am I thus soiled by envy and toil
or bettered in a blind groped striving?
I will blow a hole through a massif
not to defile its majesty, but to carve,
to carve and cut my own dark passage,
below the harrying slopes, below the treeline,
over which ice ever bars my way.

And as you push on to the summit,
short of breath and vague before the wind,
I will burst upon the nether slope
and stand, caked in the grit of digging
long and veered off from the clear true line
to find below, a mist soaked glen,
hunched beneath a hesitant dawn
while your eyes are stung white
in a naked unyielding sun.

Image: Ales Krivec on Unsplash