MAPSOL

I spent decades atop the mountain,
watching every detail of the valley and its paths,
and the faraway horizons.

I became the bird that circled the trees,
and sometimes the lizard slithering through stone.
Some asked me to soar; others said I was sliding downhill.
Some even claimed the mountain was a fiction—
and so was my imagination.

Then I realized I am the mountain itself:
the flora and the fauna, the crevices and the vermin.
And in that knowing, I arrived—
at the beginning of a journey that felt like an end,
at the end of a journey that felt like a beginning, a homecoming.