Estevan Hughes is an artist and writer born and raised in Denver, Colorado. In visual arts he has won multiple awards, honors and has been shown in various juried galleries. For writing, he has been accepted and featured in diverse public literary spaces including journals, auditoriums and the internet. His goal as an artist is to continue to create new art, remember and acknowledge the past, and inspire the future.
The Mountain Enters the Minutes
(On the Recent Nepal and Tibet Floods)
The mountain kept its counsel under snow,
while men below kept minutes, maps and money.
For centuries the glacier rehearsed its death
with the decorum of a dethroned god.
Then morning cleaved its monumental silence.
Ice, iron, granite—gravity’s grim parliament—
plunged through the valley, voting without hands,
and water ratified what fevered warmth decreed.
The Trishuli rose nine metres into history;
bridges became brief epitaphs in mud.
Pilgrims bound for Kailash carried prayers;
the river bore passports stripped of names.
A mother searched a ward of faceless strangers,
a brother crawled where once a village breathed.
Beneath the silt, a small domestic cosmos—
a cup, a cot, a photograph—kept drowning.
We call it natural: our consummate irony.
The atmosphere remembers every furnace,
each forest flayed, each mountain bored for power,
each augury entombed beneath a future budget.
Hydropower tunnels swallowed living men;
the river, contemptuous of arithmetic,
audited every rampart with its body. Across the border, information withered;
statistics stood like sentinels before silence.
Two nations shared one water, not one truth.
The diplomats discoursed on a warming world
while ice became the Himalaya’s cadaver. What flag can fortify a watershed?
What visa can embargo a deluge?
The mountain has no ministry of mercy;
the monsoon recognises no republic.
Now the glacier is no longer a scenery.
Each vanished village is an epitaph
we inscribed in smoke, then blamed upon the rain. The dead lie still. The living excavate grief.
Above them, ancient snow prepares its answer.
Sandeep Kumar Mishra is the author of 25 bestsellers and award-winning books. He has been translated into more than 20 international languages, shortlisted for more than 50 international literary and arts awards and has been published in all 6 continents inhabited by humans.
