Still kept Hikers climb
through high ice. A dark shape
breaks the surface.
 Boots stop.
 Hands clear snow. They take it
for recent—
a climber
lost only years ago. The mountain
keeps its older silence. Tools arrive. Ice is cut.
 Layers yield
to measurement.
 Dates stretch backward
five thousand
three hundred years. Bone.
Hide.
Arrowhead.
 The weight of a man
who never expected
to be read. The ice
did not invent him.
It only held
what time
could not erase. No audience
was required
for the record
to remain. A face emerges
from what first looked
like anonymous remains.
 Fragments become
a life that preceded
every living memory. The past
was not created
by being uncovered. It was uncovered
because the mountain
had already kept it. A ledger
can outlast
the attention
of those who first wrote it. What the ice held
did not become true
the moment someone
understood it. It had simply
been there—
cold,
intact,
unseen, kept. Unseen—
is not the same
as absent. 🧡🔥₿ Quiet.
 Unfinished.
 Still kept—