—For Matthew and Cameren
i. A Welcomed Peril
When I was eight years old,
I read a book about the mountaineers,
Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay,
who were the first to reach
the summit of Everest in 1953,
and was instantly obsessed
with the prospect of my own climb.
For years, in my mind,
I completed the trek from Kathmandu
to Base Camp at seventeen thousand feet,
and advanced my acclimatization
in the Khumbu Ice Falls—
how those blue-black crevasses growled,
swallowing the teeth of ice I kicked down
with my crampons into their alien mouths,
as I scraped across each spindly aluminum ladder
to reclaim my breath on the other side!
Though you may remember me referring to it
as a pipedream, my desire for those abysses,
their danger was real.
For close to four decades of my life,
it never occurred to me to question
what it would actually mean to triumph:
To reach the highest point on the planet?
Or, in the Death Zone,
with the window between snowsqualls closing fast,
to turn around shy of the summit
and come back alive?
Isn’t high-altitude mountaineering
just another fascination with the devil—
another roulette wheel with its red or black
tokens of the blood and flesh we wager
on our ascents into that inhuman cold?
The assault of childbirth on my body
was a summit push—
a welcomed peril.
It was turning myself inside out
to arrive on an exoplanet,
where time and place were tenuous,
interchangeable concepts,
and up no longer meant anything at all.
And I made it twice!
*
Seeing dawn’s fire in Everest’s icy thrall,
the ancient Tibetans named the mountain
Chomolungma, Mother Goddess of the Earth.
*
There’s no possible lifetime for me,
no parallel universe in which you both
aren’t paramount to my being,
but the best way I know how to honor this victory
is to continue my journey…
Stephanie L. Harper is an autistic poet, mother, and former Oregonian now living with the world’s most adorable husband, son, daughter, cat, and puppy in Indianapolis, IN, where she completed her MFA at Butler University. She is the author of three poetry chapbooks, including We Have Seen the Corn (Kelsay Books, 2025). Her poems appear in Cultural Daily, The Iowa Review, The Night Heron Barks, Panoply, Pleiades, Salamander Magazine, Taos Journal of Poetry, and elsewhere.
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