Here on the plains where the wind embraces light and the absence of light, where the wind is the voice of the Gods come down, the rumor of song before singing begins, here the people under the winds are wandering ever towards home, forever in movement an old man is singing the song of an absent country, beautiful, heartless as sunlight, cold as imagined winds behind the eye of the rain, and wide before us, my sons and fathers, the song of the country centers and swoops like a hawk in a sleeping land, borne upon hunger and thermals, singing forever, singing: It was not always after the wars, it was a time once when fire did not rise on its own out of the dead grass, a time of waters and of vanishing light, when we did not imagine new country arising out of the long mirage of countries remembered from mother to daughter in a ruinous dream that would not have let this happen, nor did the dance of the moons, the opened hearts of hawks, nor did the wind itself foresee the fires hot as shrew's blood in the veins of the land consuming our dream while we slept in our journeys, while these things came to pass.

The outrunners found the child among waves of grass and darkness, on the night when the moon and the moon wed one another and canceled their light and the sky was black except for a wedge of silver turned like a blade in the heart of the heavens. And the night they found him was his naming night, and the years unnamed were the years behind him, the time among leopards who must have raised him in the waves of grass and darkness, though he did not remember this, did not recount the graves upon graves to which he gave infancy, where he buried the first words of childhood, And the night they found him was his naming night.