“i would give something in return…”

Marie Burdett of the University of St. Thomas in Houston gives us a glimpse of paradise in her award-winning poem from the Deep Wild 2025 Student Writing Contest.

Colchuk Lake
Marie Burdett

when day breaks
we journey up the long
mountain road,
the eroded footpaths of stump and stone,
steep as jacob’s ladder to heaven. 

we are going where 
the mountains are broken open
like a bowl of many-faceted sapphires.
the sun, a keen-eyed lapidary,
polishes each gleaming one.
i breathe in the clarified air 
that splinters in my lungs.

i would give something in return
something more than the burn
of weary muscles —
the pain, the price of paradise.