I have been reading about the death-toll on Mount Everest, and seen the photograph (in The Guardian, here and here) of the current human traffic jam at the summit, trying to push upward, sometimes stepping over the bodies of other dead climbers. This piece, this poem, emerged for me as a commentary on the news, and of thinking about the inhuman and about certain forms of eco-tourism and terrible sublimity emerging in the accelerated epoch now named the Anthropocene. A hybrid sonnet came out, in fives and sixes. I want to put it up on this blog because of the immediacy and the temporality of its subject matter. It was composed and edited over about three days.
Tourist Climbers, Mount Everest, Nepal Side, Late May 2019
(See the Photograph by Nirmal Purja)
Triumphantly inadequate: out of ten-plus
amateurs, permits intact, who’d expire
in a crammed mass ascent through the kill zone this week,
most, chuffed with so much third-hand hubris, got
sucker-punched by the hypoxic sublime. Sure, sure,
a blue-balling few summited, but only
to crumple along the first leg of the slog down.
(People stepped over them, stiffened. A line
of down-filled anoraks snaked its impacted track
up the crown ridge, strewn with used O2 tanks,
marking a slow-witted hokey-pokey topward.
You choose to bend and help, you don’t make it.)
No cliff jockey returns from this fierce place unscarred,
having clomped past the air’s inhuman edge.
