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Mountaintop Removal

In geologic time, I crashed against other lands. Eras-long conflicts bore weathered peaks and glacial run-off. Downstream, this created your home, your fertile land. You napped under a shade tree, a blink of your eyes. Your lifetime is a blink of mine.

Then as ants, you scrambled up my side. No different than the elk and goats before your time.

But then you felled the trees rooted in my skull, stealing their corpses away. Some had lived for hundreds of years, gone in an instant. My layers eroded with each rain.

You began to carve small pockets in my skin. Then part of my great slope shattered. Lithic viscera splattered down my lower half from the chasm in my head. I groaned, resonating with that horrible blast.

Then you swarmed up top by the hundreds, buzzing away, blowing me apart, decapitating me day by day. I sat there, crying in a low rumble.

You poured my once-grand summit in the valley nearby. You scraped my now-exposed organs out from my core. I overheard, they’ll be burned.

After you hollowed out my chest, you abandoned me, flattened and headless. It began to rain again, washing out the valley. My poisonous, pulverized head leached into the river.

Blink.