The heart of the fires

You tell me that silence
is nearer to peace than poems
But if for my gift
I brought you silence
(for I know silence)
you would say
"This is not silence,
this is another poem"
and you would hand it back to me.

Leonard Cohen

There had been a quiet that permeated through-out the harigga unless you listened closely. Surrounding the fires were the voices of women, speaking together of importance's that perhaps only women understand. Stories of beginnings wove their way through our hearts and our memories.

Jaella may have began it all when she told of when she and her mate first met. A romantic tale of shyness and a courage to reach beyond it. Cana began to talk of her first love and the union that resulted from it. I heard an Or scoff stumbling upon us, something about women and their soft ways. I think he failed to see the picture as a whole. These were the stories that would be handed down, not merely the weaving of a life history that would be sung by the singers but of the depths of hearts of fire. The glimpses inside the very nature of a human beings alive with more than just breath. These were stories of passions, of loves, and of sorrows.

Cana had her reasons for reciting the beginnings of her histories with her children's fathers. I had reason to listen to every word, inhaling them intensely enough to be able to breathe them once more as if to bring them to life. I had to even as the tears well up inside and choke my throat until I feel as if they will take my own life and I inhale them deeper still. The life calendar had not been made for these beginnings so I would be the one to tell Tug, to tell Another one and to tell Also and his brothers and sisters. I would hold the treasures of their histories and return them to their rightful places when the time came to release them.

They had not been a day in the making but spanned envars and so too it would not be a day in the collecting. Time was of an essence to gather them all now because I no longer felt there would be envars to save them.

We would speak beyond the late ahns of dusk ... far into the nights until exhaustion itself would rock us and the sudden jerk of realizing it had its hold and then we would rasp ragged promises to each other to begin again tomorrow ... desperate with hope that tomorrow there would be one more chance.