I want mostly to remember your voice,

chanting a ballad of praise for the dead

of battle. Your notes soared, an echoing cry

that cleft into every rock and tree, song

in your deep bass tongue, with a keening wind

as instrumental. You, who had to join

forces with strangers who could never join

in your hymn, who’d never heard your god’s voice

calling from the shadows or on the wind.

For some of them, your face brought back dead

nightmares, formless things that no mother’s song

could banish from their dreams. They would cry

themselves to sleep. The things you wished to cry

from the pit at those forcing you to join

fights left you scarred. They had bought your life-song

for thirty pieces of silver. Your voice,

your soul’s voice, heart’s voice, was maimed, left for dead.

you survived, but you did not live. The wind-

ing path you walked was empty, and the wind

hissed, taunted you, bit you, made you cry

to an empty arena that pain was dead,

and couldn’t hurt you anymore. To join

in life, you needed strength and courage. Voice

beginning to heal, you wrote your own song.

And now today, on the battlefield, song

fills the earth and sky. On the dusty wind

a gorgeous sound travels. Slowly, you voice

years of heartache and suffering, you cry

out your hardships wordlessly. And they join

their voices with yours, the honored, nameless dead.

You speak for them. Your trials are theirs, your dead

memories are shared. I have heard this song

before, in waking dreams, and try to join

my voice to yours, but I sound like the wind

compared to your thunder. You slow your cry

of thanks to the gods and we sing, one voice.

As one, the voiceless dead sigh with the wind,

providing the song’s tune. And the hills cry

to the stars to join, echoing our voice.

~~De’i’lana, finished May 17, 2000.