What Is Value (Dawn)

Lyrics

The air is the colour of a pearl. Still cool.
Before the blue, before the gold, before the day is named.
I hold a stone in my palm, a piece of the riverbed,
cool from the long, dreaming night.
Its edges worn smooth. By water?
Or by a thousand other hands, a thousand other mornings just like this one?
The weight of it is real. A simple fact.
The weight of it is the only thing that's real, just now, in this quiet.
Before the bartering begins.

What is value?
Is it the heft in the hand? This undeniable pull?
The glint in the eye of the one who wants it more than I do?
What is value?
Is it the hunger it answers, or the one it creates?
A question asked to the rising light.

Is it the salt on the tongue that keeps the meat for winter?
The story told around a fire, that keeps the tribe together?
The breathtaking danger in the diving for the perfect shell?
The memory of the man who died bringing the stone from the mountain?
His name is part of the price now.
Before the stamp of the lion, before the face of the king,
before the promise was written on clay...
There was just this. A thing. Held. And a story about the holding.

What is value?
Is it the warmth of the living herd, the breath in the cold air?
The sharpness of the obsidian blade that took a week to flake?
The silence after the bargain is finally struck?
What is value?
Is it the thing I give, or the thing I can't bear to lose?
A whisper in the ear of the dawn.

The sun has not yet made its argument.
The world is still just shape and shadow, possibility and mist.
And this question...
...it hangs here, between one breath and the next.
It has no weight, no edge, no temperature.
But I feel it more than the stone in my hand.
It is the first transaction of the day.
The payment is attention.

The bright coin rises over the hill.
And the question... it begins again.
What is value?