At the Root of Her Tree

The people of my village
eagerly await your next coming.
They perform songs and complex dances
to commemorate your past visitations
and importune your swift return.

The last time you came
it was in the shape
of a soft-winged bird
that sang a whole summer
both day and night
in the woods beyond our village.

The time before that
you came as a woman.

You gave yourself in love
to the leader of our people
and remained long enough
to bear him a child
on a night in midwinter.
You named your son
and were gone in the morning.
So I have been told.

I grew up without you.
Changeling, talisman:
guarded with care,
loved and feared. I was
never allowed to fight
in our wars.

Women, for so long as I can remember,
would bring their warrior's weapons
and their newborn children
for me to bless. Later they began to
come for themselves, in the dark.

One night in that summer
when my mother
came to us as a bird
I stole away into the forest.

The night was warm and windless.
A great sky, spilled with stars
hung above me. One fell.

Moving under grey-green leaves
I came to where the bird my mother was
sang gloriously. I saw her
on the branch of a moonlit tree.

Her wings were silver in the light.
Her head was tilted back
in song. Her voice,
a thing not of this world,
soared above the forest,
the tilled and fallow fields,
all the curvature of earth.

In that creature of uncompromising joy
what place could there be for a human child
begotten one green year for who knows why?
My mother's voice caroled over my head,
a chalice of song. I listened
for a woven time, and then lay down
at the root of her tree to sleep.

In the morning I walked back to the village
and learned that a woman
had borne my child in the night.

I went to the place where she was
and took the infant in my arms
carefully. I held it close
to my beating heart and,
bending my stiff head down slowly,
let its loud triumphant crying
drown the singing of my mother
in the deep surrounding woods.

© Guy Gavriel Kay