Golden youth golden and embolden 
brain and brawn fair-haired and rugged 
and doused with derring-do 
charm so gracious so guileless 
wearing charisma so form-fitting 
flashing horizon-wide big-teeth smile 
with blue-eyed vision vertically affixed 
on honor with humor on virility with humility 
on the indigenously dual-named goddess mountain 
Sagarmatha / Chomolungma straddling Nepal / Tibet. 

Golden youth golden and embolden 
pushing onward upward seeking life’s peaks 
indispensable irrepressible chosen by George Mallory 
the climbing aesthete gripped by vainglorious ambition 
you the least experienced to pair with him on ultimate ascent 
within sight within frigid grasp of summit sublime 
tied to your leader your mentor your idol your haunted hero 
each in gabardine coats and hobnail boots stepping 
stepping into the risks into the mists slowly stepping 
disappearing evermore into Himalayan lore. 

Robert Eugene Rubino

is the author of a prose and poetry collection, Aficionado (Humming Word Press), and two poetry collections: Vanity Unfair and Other Poems (Cathexis Northwest Press) and Douglas Knocks Out Tyson (UnCollected Press). He lives in the San Francisco Bay area.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Seventeen of Rubino’s poems published across seven issues of The Write Launch (2019-2022)

⚡ Hollow Be Thy Name, a poem by Rubino in Issue 12 of KYSO Flash (Summer 2019)

⚡ An Interview With Robert Eugene Rubino at Haunted Waters Press

⚡ Owl House, a poem in Splash! (Haunted Waters Press)