The Mountain Remembers

Before they came,
I was only wind on stone,
snow in the creases of my skin,
and roots clinging like prayers to the dark.

I have watched the wolf before.
He is older than the frost,
a thing that walks between shadows and light
as if they were doors in the same house.
He comes down from my ribs
when the silence grows too soft,
when the flock forgets what teeth are.

I have held the lamb before.
They are all the same—
small, warm, trusting.
The kind of innocence that believes
the cliff is an end,
not an opening.

When he touched him,
I felt the tremor in my bones.
It was not love;
it was the slow grind of hunger against hope,
a friction that makes even stone ache.

The sheep were gone before the snow melted.
The lamb followed, not because he was weak,
but because the sun in the wolf’s hands
looked brighter than the stars I cradle each night.

And when he fell from my edge,
I did not catch him.
It is not my place to choose
who walks the pasture
and who feeds the dark.

The wolf will return.
He always does.
The lamb will not.
But somewhere, far below,
his bones are turning to soil,
and one day, grass will grow there—
green and sweet enough
to draw the wolf down again.

by Onnaya