This is an amusing piece. It was not entirely my own doing.

I am a roleplayer. I tend, as a poet and a musician, to create characters that are, also, poets and musicians. This is an unnerving tendency of mine. However, some of the various pieces that emerge from this amalgamation of bits of my mind are quite good.

This poem was "written by" one Perry Aobheil Briarfist, an AD&D character. It also has music (which, as of this writing {April 29, 1998} I have written about half of). The poem was set to my subconscious as a challenge. (The music as well; I do not play the harp.)

This poem, as presented, is in translation. It was originally "written" in a fictional language of which I, as player, know only one word. That language has the capability to express more nuance and subtlety in emotion, due to the nature of the people who speak it. It is additionally presented without its music - and Perry, by her nature, tends to use music to bridge the more typical (for language) gaps between what is meant and what the words are capable of expressing. However, I have the advantage of being a far better poet than Perry, so I hope my "translation" from the original will be able to convey her meaning.

This poem is a triple-entendre. To explain it requires explaining a little bit of Perry herself, much of which information is on her character page (linked above). However, I will note it below for the lazy and the people who have read the above.

Perry is a half-elf, born in the New World to Old World colonists in the game universe called Dark. Her elven family leads a nomadic tribal existence, many of them becoming skilled woodsmen, a craft which she took to quite readily. Her given name is not Perry - but Aobheil, which is a Scottish Gaelic name meaning "the joyous one." (The name, incidentally, is pronounced something like EIH-o-vel, and was Anglicized by the author C. J. Cherryh to 'Arafel' in a pair of her novels, now collected in the single volume The Dreaming Tree.) For various reasons, when she left her family, she swore she would not use Aobheil again until she found a place where she truly belonged and had a purpose - adopting the name 'Perry' to call herself, which is a pronouncable and spellable bastardization of the Gaelic word for pipe-music.

In her time between then and 'now' in game-time, she became a Falconer, with a companion hawk known as Argent. Argent is a silver-feathered bird, whose pinions shade to indigo at the tips. Perry loves the bird with a quiet peacefulness, the same as she grants the two gods she reveres above the others - Dei, the goddess of the druidic balance, and the Hawklord, who is the deity of the element of air, whose realm is the sky and weather.

One of her unwinged (most of the time, at least) companions is an elf by the name of Gwynedd. For a variety of complicated reasons, she has given him the name Aobheil, and told him what it means. The song is written in his native language.

Chase entendres and strayed metaphors as you please - not all of them have been explained.