The Druidic Oral

Lyrics

These groves have forgotten the sound.
I have not.
I remember when the branches held more than the wind.
When the silence between the stones was a held breath before the first verse.

They did not trust the letter.
Ink fades, they said. Papyrus burns. Clay shatters.
Truth was a thing you carried in your lungs.
Twenty years to learn the shape of it.
The genealogies of kings, the motions of the stars,
the laws that bind the living to the long dead.
Not a list. A litany.
A forest of voices rising in the cold dawn.

We were the book you could not read.
We were the library that walked and breathed.
Our memory was the only temple.
Our bodies, the only scroll.
You could not burn the word from the page,
because the word was the blood, the pulse, the age.

Then came the man with the stylus and the standard.
He wrote us down in his book of wars.
Called our knowledge a shadow, a conspiracy in the trees.
He said it was improper to keep a god in the air.
A truth had to be pinned.
Nailed to a page.
He could not own what he could not file.
He could not conquer what he could not count.

So he came to obliterate the library.
Not with fire for the shelves, but with iron for the librarians.
They swung their axes at the roots of the grove.
And at the throats that held the verses.
The silence they made was total.
The great un-writing.
What dies when the last speaker falls?
Everything.

But I am older than his empire.
Older than the silence.
And I remember the sound.
Listen.
In the rustle of the last oak leaves.
I am singing you the first line.
Alethanos. I am singing you back.