Jepthah's Daughter

I am not the daughter sent up the mountain
to mourn. But, like her, I ascend it –
hill of black pines — to weep,
to litter my cries at the trees’ shadowfeet
that creep toward the summit.
What we search for in the high places
is the same, though millennia
separate our long climb:
it is for the death watch that we come,
to pray in the shade of a laurel bush
that our fears do not hold us.
While sunset flames onto the cliffside
I see how her life burned there
on a brilliant altar, and how my dying
will come to this pinnacle too –
where the promise of an end
meets the end itself, like peak meets sky.