Poetry
Song Of The Nine Heroes
From the north came danger, as we knew it would,
In the vanguard of winter, a dragon's dance
Unraveled the land, until out of the forest,
Out of the plains they came, out of the mothering
earth, the sky unreckoned before them.
Nine they were, under three moons,
Under the autumn twilight:
As the world declined, they arose
Into the heart of the story.
One from a garden of stone arising,
From dwarf-halls, from weather and wisdom,
Where the heart and mind ride unquestioned
In the untapped vein of the hand.
In his fathering arms, the spirit gathered.
Nine they were, under three moons,
Under the autumn twilight:
As the world declined, they arose
Into the heart of the story.
One from a haven of breezes descending,
Light in the handling air,
To the waving meadows, the kender's country,
Where the grain out of smallness arises itself
To grow green and golden and green again.
Nine they were, under three moons,
Under the autumn twilight:
As the world declined, they arose
Into the heart of the story.
The next from the plains, the long lands keeping,
Nurtured in distance, horizons of nothing.
Bearing a staff she came, and a burden
Of mercy and light converged in her hand:
Bearing the wounds of the world, she came.
Nine they were, under three moons,
Under the autumn twilight:
As the world declined, they arose
Into the heart of the story.
The next from the plains, in the moon's shadow,
Through custom, through ritual, trailing the moon
Where her phases, her wax and her wane, controlled
The tide of his blood, and his warrior's hand
Ascended through hierarchies of space into light.
Nine they were, under three moons,
Under the autumn twilight:
As the world declined, they arose
Into the heart of the story.
One within absences, known by departures,
The dark swordswoman at the heart of the fire:
Her glories the space between words,
The cradlesong recollected in age,
Recalled at the edge of awakening and thought.
Nine they were, under three moons,
Under the autumn twilight:
As the world declined, they arose
Into the heart of the story.
One in the heart of honor, formed by the sword,
By the centuries' flight of the kingfisher over the
land,by Solamnia ruined and risen, rising again
When the heart ascends into duty.
As it dances, the sword is forever an heirloom.
Nine they were, under three moons,
Under the autumn twilight:
As the world declined, they arose
Into the heart of the story.
The next in a simple light a brother to darkness,
Letting the sword hand try all subtleties,
Even the intricate webs of the heart. His thoughts
Are pools disrupted in changing wind -
He cannot see their bottom.
Nine they were, under three moons,
Under the autumn twilight:
As the world declined, they arose
Into the heart of the story.
The next the leader, half-elven, betrayed
As the twining blood pulls asunder the land,
The forests, the worlds of elves and men.
Called into bravery, but fearing for love,
And fearing that, called into both, he does nothing.
Nine they were, under three moons,
Under the autumn twilight:
As the world declined, they arose
Into the heart of the story.
The last from the darkness, breathing the night,
Where the abstract stars hide a nest of words,
Where the body endures the wound of numbers,
Surrendered to knowledge, until, unable to bless,
His blessing falls on the low, the benighted.
Nine they were, under three moons,
Under the autumn twilight:
As the world declined, they arose
Into the heart of the story.
Joined by others they were in the telling:
A graceless girl, graced beyond graces;
A princess of seeds and saplings, called to the
forest; an ancient weaver of accidents;
Nor can we say who the story will gather.
Nine they were, under three moons,
Under the autumn twilight:
As the world declined, they arose
Into the heart of the story.
From the north came danger, as we knew it would:
In encampments of winter, the dragon's sleep
Has settled the land, but out of the forest,
Out of the plains they come, from the mothering earth
Defining the sky before them.
Nine they were, under three moons,
Under the autumn twilight:
As the world declined, they arose
Into the heart of the story.
Raistlin's Farewell
Caramon, the Gods have tricked the world
In absences, in gifts, and all of us
Are housed within their cruelties. The wit
That was our heritage, they lodged in me,
Enough to see all differences: the light
In Tika's eye when she looks elsewhere,
The tremble in Laurana's voice when she
Speaks to Tanis, and the graceful sweep
Of Goldmoon's hair at Riverwind's approach.
They look at me, and even with your mind
I could discern the difference. Here I sit,
A body frail as bird bones.
In return
The Gods teach us compassion, teach us mercy,
That compensation. Sometimes they succeed,
For I have felt the hot spit of injustice
Turn through those too weak to fight their brothers
For sustenance or love, and in that feeling
The pain lulled and diminished to a glow,
I pitied as you pitied, and in that
Rose above the weakest of the litter.
You, my brother, in your thoughtless grace,
That special world in which the sword arm spins
The wild arm of ambition and the eye
Gives flawless guidance to the flawless hand,
You cannot follow me, cannot observe
The landscape of cracked mirrors in the soul,
The aching hollowness in sleight of hand.
And yet you love me, simple as the rush
and balance of our blindly mingled blood,
Or as a hot sword aching through the snow:
It is the mutual need that puzzles you,
The deep complexity lodged in the veins.
Wild in the dance of battle, when you stand,
A shield before your brother, it is then
Your nourishment arises from the heart
Of all my weakness.
When I am gone,
Where will you find the fullness of your blood?
Backed in the heart's loud tunnels?
I have heard
The Queen's soft lullaby, Her serenade
And call to battle mingling in the night;
This music calls me to my quiet throne
Deep in Her senseless kingdom.
Dragonlords
Throught to bring the darkness into light,
Corrupt it with the mornings and the moons -
In balance is all purity destroyed,
But in voluptuous darkness lies the truth,
The final, graceful dance.
But not for you:
You cannot follow me into the night,
Into the maze of sweetness. For you stand
Cradled by the sun, in solid lands,
Expecting nothing, having lost your way
Before the road became unspeakable.
It is beyond explaining, and the words
Will make you stumble. Tanis is your friend,
My little orphan, and he will explain
Those things he glimpsed in the shadow's path,
For he knew Kitiara and the shine
Of the dark moon on her darkest hair,
And yet he cannot threaten, for the night
Breathes in a moist wind on my waiting face.
The Legacy
Always the son in that oldest of stories,
sport of the blood in its natural turning,
the charmed one, least likely to end up heroic,
captures the crown and the grail and the princess.
Suddenly, out of the shires of concealment
the least likely son perseveres and arises
after veiling his heart through the hooded night,
and his unmasked glory of grail and of jewelry
effaces the moment before the beginning of stories,
when the galvanic heartbeat contended with ice and illusion,
when the world was a country of mirrors and brothers,
and harmony broke on the long effacement of days.
It is brothers like these whom poetry touches,
who are handy with visions instead of with swords,
whose pale light is hidden in the cloud of their knowing.
But for each who emerges past wounds and obscurity,
for each who negotiates bramble and dragon and wizard,
there is another forever forgotten
conceded and wed to the language of brothers,
lost in the bloodline of sword and money
in the old palindrome of the spirit.
It is brothers like these that the poets sing,
for their baffled courage and the water's solace
for the one in the bramble and the failed inheritance,
it is for these that the ink is drying, it is for these
that the angels come.
Raistlin's Daughter
The first sign of the change is not the golden eye
nor the dangerous stature the countenance of hill and desert,
instead it is the child's breath the chill of water underground
the cry at night a memory of knives
and you startle sit up in bed and say
this is something I have made somehow I have made this thing.
So you fear it away let the night cover your dream
and the red moon wades through a hundred journeys
jostled in blood in the coded vein,
and then the arrivals rending the edge of belief
a vacancy in play the abstract smile
that has nothing to do with whatever you did
and you know that your wishes
can never conceal the long recollection of elsewhere.
The cuckoo's story, the supplanted nest
the egg left in care of unwary others.
Surely its child is alien, elfshot,
stolen by gypsies, forever another,
and yet, in the accident of blood and adoption,
as it was in your time and the time of your mothers,
forever and always your own.
So sing to the stranger this lullaby
Sing the inventions of family
the fiction of brothers
the bardic ruse of the father
Sing the mother concocted of reasons and light,
Sing to me, golden-eyed daughter.
Water from Dust Crysania's Song
Water from dust, and dust rising out of water
Continents forming, abstract as color or light
To the vanished eye, to the touch of Paladine's daughter
Who knows with a touch that the robe is white,
Out of that water a country is rising, impossible
When first imagined in prayer,
And the sun and the seas and the stars invisible
As gods in a code of air.
Dust from the water, and water arising from dust,
And the robe containing all colors assumed into white,
Into memory, into countries assumed in the trust
Of ever returning color and light,
Out of that dust arises a well spring of tears
To nourish the work of our hands
In forever approaching country of yearning and years,
In due and immanent lands.
From the north came danger, as we knew it would,
In the vanguard of winter, a dragon's dance
Unraveled the land, until out of the forest,
Out of the plains they came, out of the mothering
earth, the sky unreckoned before them.
Nine they were, under three moons,
Under the autumn twilight:
As the world declined, they arose
Into the heart of the story.
One from a garden of stone arising,
From dwarf-halls, from weather and wisdom,
Where the heart and mind ride unquestioned
In the untapped vein of the hand.
In his fathering arms, the spirit gathered.
Nine they were, under three moons,
Under the autumn twilight:
As the world declined, they arose
Into the heart of the story.
One from a haven of breezes descending,
Light in the handling air,
To the waving meadows, the kender's country,
Where the grain out of smallness arises itself
To grow green and golden and green again.
Nine they were, under three moons,
Under the autumn twilight:
As the world declined, they arose
Into the heart of the story.
The next from the plains, the long lands keeping,
Nurtured in distance, horizons of nothing.
Bearing a staff she came, and a burden
Of mercy and light converged in her hand:
Bearing the wounds of the world, she came.
Nine they were, under three moons,
Under the autumn twilight:
As the world declined, they arose
Into the heart of the story.
The next from the plains, in the moon's shadow,
Through custom, through ritual, trailing the moon
Where her phases, her wax and her wane, controlled
The tide of his blood, and his warrior's hand
Ascended through hierarchies of space into light.
Nine they were, under three moons,
Under the autumn twilight:
As the world declined, they arose
Into the heart of the story.
One within absences, known by departures,
The dark swordswoman at the heart of the fire:
Her glories the space between words,
The cradlesong recollected in age,
Recalled at the edge of awakening and thought.
Nine they were, under three moons,
Under the autumn twilight:
As the world declined, they arose
Into the heart of the story.
One in the heart of honor, formed by the sword,
By the centuries' flight of the kingfisher over the
land,by Solamnia ruined and risen, rising again
When the heart ascends into duty.
As it dances, the sword is forever an heirloom.
Nine they were, under three moons,
Under the autumn twilight:
As the world declined, they arose
Into the heart of the story.
The next in a simple light a brother to darkness,
Letting the sword hand try all subtleties,
Even the intricate webs of the heart. His thoughts
Are pools disrupted in changing wind -
He cannot see their bottom.
Nine they were, under three moons,
Under the autumn twilight:
As the world declined, they arose
Into the heart of the story.
The next the leader, half-elven, betrayed
As the twining blood pulls asunder the land,
The forests, the worlds of elves and men.
Called into bravery, but fearing for love,
And fearing that, called into both, he does nothing.
Nine they were, under three moons,
Under the autumn twilight:
As the world declined, they arose
Into the heart of the story.
The last from the darkness, breathing the night,
Where the abstract stars hide a nest of words,
Where the body endures the wound of numbers,
Surrendered to knowledge, until, unable to bless,
His blessing falls on the low, the benighted.
Nine they were, under three moons,
Under the autumn twilight:
As the world declined, they arose
Into the heart of the story.
Joined by others they were in the telling:
A graceless girl, graced beyond graces;
A princess of seeds and saplings, called to the
forest; an ancient weaver of accidents;
Nor can we say who the story will gather.
Nine they were, under three moons,
Under the autumn twilight:
As the world declined, they arose
Into the heart of the story.
From the north came danger, as we knew it would:
In encampments of winter, the dragon's sleep
Has settled the land, but out of the forest,
Out of the plains they come, from the mothering earth
Defining the sky before them.
Nine they were, under three moons,
Under the autumn twilight:
As the world declined, they arose
Into the heart of the story.
Raistlin's Farewell
Caramon, the Gods have tricked the world
In absences, in gifts, and all of us
Are housed within their cruelties. The wit
That was our heritage, they lodged in me,
Enough to see all differences: the light
In Tika's eye when she looks elsewhere,
The tremble in Laurana's voice when she
Speaks to Tanis, and the graceful sweep
Of Goldmoon's hair at Riverwind's approach.
They look at me, and even with your mind
I could discern the difference. Here I sit,
A body frail as bird bones.
In return
The Gods teach us compassion, teach us mercy,
That compensation. Sometimes they succeed,
For I have felt the hot spit of injustice
Turn through those too weak to fight their brothers
For sustenance or love, and in that feeling
The pain lulled and diminished to a glow,
I pitied as you pitied, and in that
Rose above the weakest of the litter.
You, my brother, in your thoughtless grace,
That special world in which the sword arm spins
The wild arm of ambition and the eye
Gives flawless guidance to the flawless hand,
You cannot follow me, cannot observe
The landscape of cracked mirrors in the soul,
The aching hollowness in sleight of hand.
And yet you love me, simple as the rush
and balance of our blindly mingled blood,
Or as a hot sword aching through the snow:
It is the mutual need that puzzles you,
The deep complexity lodged in the veins.
Wild in the dance of battle, when you stand,
A shield before your brother, it is then
Your nourishment arises from the heart
Of all my weakness.
When I am gone,
Where will you find the fullness of your blood?
Backed in the heart's loud tunnels?
I have heard
The Queen's soft lullaby, Her serenade
And call to battle mingling in the night;
This music calls me to my quiet throne
Deep in Her senseless kingdom.
Dragonlords
Throught to bring the darkness into light,
Corrupt it with the mornings and the moons -
In balance is all purity destroyed,
But in voluptuous darkness lies the truth,
The final, graceful dance.
But not for you:
You cannot follow me into the night,
Into the maze of sweetness. For you stand
Cradled by the sun, in solid lands,
Expecting nothing, having lost your way
Before the road became unspeakable.
It is beyond explaining, and the words
Will make you stumble. Tanis is your friend,
My little orphan, and he will explain
Those things he glimpsed in the shadow's path,
For he knew Kitiara and the shine
Of the dark moon on her darkest hair,
And yet he cannot threaten, for the night
Breathes in a moist wind on my waiting face.
The Legacy
Always the son in that oldest of stories,
sport of the blood in its natural turning,
the charmed one, least likely to end up heroic,
captures the crown and the grail and the princess.
Suddenly, out of the shires of concealment
the least likely son perseveres and arises
after veiling his heart through the hooded night,
and his unmasked glory of grail and of jewelry
effaces the moment before the beginning of stories,
when the galvanic heartbeat contended with ice and illusion,
when the world was a country of mirrors and brothers,
and harmony broke on the long effacement of days.
It is brothers like these whom poetry touches,
who are handy with visions instead of with swords,
whose pale light is hidden in the cloud of their knowing.
But for each who emerges past wounds and obscurity,
for each who negotiates bramble and dragon and wizard,
there is another forever forgotten
conceded and wed to the language of brothers,
lost in the bloodline of sword and money
in the old palindrome of the spirit.
It is brothers like these that the poets sing,
for their baffled courage and the water's solace
for the one in the bramble and the failed inheritance,
it is for these that the ink is drying, it is for these
that the angels come.
Raistlin's Daughter
The first sign of the change is not the golden eye
nor the dangerous stature the countenance of hill and desert,
instead it is the child's breath the chill of water underground
the cry at night a memory of knives
and you startle sit up in bed and say
this is something I have made somehow I have made this thing.
So you fear it away let the night cover your dream
and the red moon wades through a hundred journeys
jostled in blood in the coded vein,
and then the arrivals rending the edge of belief
a vacancy in play the abstract smile
that has nothing to do with whatever you did
and you know that your wishes
can never conceal the long recollection of elsewhere.
The cuckoo's story, the supplanted nest
the egg left in care of unwary others.
Surely its child is alien, elfshot,
stolen by gypsies, forever another,
and yet, in the accident of blood and adoption,
as it was in your time and the time of your mothers,
forever and always your own.
So sing to the stranger this lullaby
Sing the inventions of family
the fiction of brothers
the bardic ruse of the father
Sing the mother concocted of reasons and light,
Sing to me, golden-eyed daughter.
Water from Dust Crysania's Song
Water from dust, and dust rising out of water
Continents forming, abstract as color or light
To the vanished eye, to the touch of Paladine's daughter
Who knows with a touch that the robe is white,
Out of that water a country is rising, impossible
When first imagined in prayer,
And the sun and the seas and the stars invisible
As gods in a code of air.
Dust from the water, and water arising from dust,
And the robe containing all colors assumed into white,
Into memory, into countries assumed in the trust
Of ever returning color and light,
Out of that dust arises a well spring of tears
To nourish the work of our hands
In forever approaching country of yearning and years,
In due and immanent lands.