All Things Pass

Upon a cliff where ancient cedars grow,

A monk sits still above the clouds below.

The mist ascends like ghosts from valleys deep,

While distant peaks dissolve in dreams of sleep.

Beneath a tree, whose roots embrace the stone,

He sits with grief that time has made his own.

The morning wind moves softly through his hair,

As though the world still knows the weight he bears.

For once, his life was altered in a day,

And nothing since has been the same way.

A door once closed that would not open wide,

And something in his heart had slowly died.

He does not speak of what he saw that night,

Nor how it stole the certainty of light.

Some wounds are not for language to repair,

But settle deep and live forever there.

The years have passed like rivers to the sea,

Yet still that moment walks beside him silently.

He feels its shadow in the fading sun,

A chapter sealed, but never truly done.

He watches clouds rise upward from the deep,

Like memories that stir before they sleep.

They gather, drift, and vanish into air,

As if they never had been gathered there.

His hands grow thin. His breathing soft and slow.

The strength that carried him begins to go.

The world he knew recedes beyond his sight,

Like temple bells dissolving into night.

And what remains when memory grows dim,

When even names grow distant, strange, and thin?

When faces fade like footprints after rain,

And time unthreads the fabric of his name?

Perhaps the mountain does not ask him why.

Perhaps the mist does not ask him to reply.

The tree gives shade without a word or claim,

And neither wind nor stone recalls his name.

So let the years unfasten what they may.

Let yesterday grow dim and drift away.

The mountain keeps no ledger of the dead;

The stars shine on where countless lives have fled.

One autumn dusk, beneath the cedar's bough,

He cannot quite remember who he was, or how

The sorrow came to settle in his chest,

Or what it was that robbed his heart of rest.

He watches mist enfold the mountainside,

And feels no need to name what lies inside.

The monk, the wound, the years, the fading flame—

All loosen from the burden of a name.

And when at last he leaves the world behind,

No final answer waits for him to find.

The breath returns to air, the bones to earth,

The silence holds no measure of his worth.

Below, the mist rolls onward through the vale.

Above, the stars emerge, serene and pale.

The cedar stands where countless dawns have shone,

Its roots entwined with lives already gone.

And somewhere in the vastness, wild and deep,

The universe continues in its sleep—

While all that he once was, and could not be,

Returns to that which has no boundary.

No monument shall mark the place he lay.

The wind will comb the fallen leaves away.

Yet nothing vanishes as we suppose;

The river flows through every form it knows.

And high above the mist, the old tree stands,

Its branches reaching toward unanswering lands.

The mountain keeps its silence, vast and steep—

And all things fade.

And all things sleep.