There are murmurs in the crevices of my mind
where I have deposited my invisible companions,
restlessness growing and the threat of mutiny.

Silvery tentacles of yearning fill the air,
I am cradled in the branches of the world tree
that dares not release me into the wind.

Beneath the flooded earth with broken tulips
there are voices echoing in the exhausted stone depths,
chanters that can no longer speak as humans.

I am rising with the smoke of destroyed villages,
folding my raven wings against my form,
myself shouting for an answer in the vacant land.

We never receive an answer in our language
of  the trees and the birds and the earth,
and instead we are shaped like clay vessels
and silenced with a hemlock cloth.