Tales of the Warrior: A Covenant Renewed

When summer’s brilliant green
First embraced an autumn coloring,
Dappled lightly across the wood,
These were the days
When the warrior recalled a forest and
a long-ago sacrifice.
Deep in his soul he sighed.
He went forth to find the maid
In her garden.
Much was lost to her.
Gone was the brittle whiteness
Of her throne-room finery,
But also gone was the supple leather
Tanned methodically under spiced oils:
Her garb in their days of courtship.
No, now she knelt in sackcloth,
Thin and worn.
She hovered over a fruit-laden plank
Where a knife in her hand pierced the skins
And made the fruit blood run.

“Is your brow so devoured by grief you do not know me, Woman?
Is this your legacy from that Son of Terror?”
He whispered, for dread was settled upon him.
He was prepared to follow
many threads of possibility when they should speak once more,
but ne'er anticipated this thread.
He'd not foreseen this girl,
one who sat in a pool of over-ripe juice
spilling out.

“At least it is only grief devouring my brow,”
She muttered—to herself, as though the stranger
were an imagined phantom, not at all a lost love.

“So your wisdom has abandoned you utterly,” he sighed.
“Oh, Sweet Water, if I came as a grape-gatherer
To find again the promise locked in your unripe days,
Would any partof you remain for the harvesting?”

Her captive eyes made a squint
--just for a moment--
Searching for some memory worth touching
In her ravaged mind.
Daring only a faint glance there.
“I remember the name Sweet Water…”

“Yes,” he coaxed. “To remember
It is the first weapon of our warfare.”

She glanced at him, though still not seeing…”And to thirst,”
she dared a whispered touch of communion.

“And to grieve…” he took her cheek in his palm as he sang
this song of spoken words with her.

Like muddy water settling, her eyes cleared.
“Oh, but no! To remember you…my heart would wail,
I have no strength. I cannot bear it!
I am utterly broken. You would have me see myself? No,
for I can be naught but a reflection of derision and dismay in your eyes.
Better to forget—“ and she
Began her drift again,
Her gaze dropping to a pomegranate
Hard in her hand as it’s blood ran through her fingers.

He thought.
And, he prayed.
Then he cupped her hand of mangled fruit
In his own hand.
“How many seeds do you see, Sweet Water?”

She did not look at him; she looked at the fruit.
Still, she answered.
“Many.”

“And will each bear a new plant?”
She frowned. “Of course not. Maybe only one. Maybe not even that.”

“Yet God put all those seeds why?
Possibility, rampant
In that one fruit.
Amazing is it not?
Of all the fruit dropped by the mother plant,
And of all the seeds in each piece of fruit.
How many, love, how many actually take root
Becoming a new era in the life of the plant’s
Eternal thrusting forward?”

Bemused, she listened still.

“My beloved, don’t you see.
If the Creator of all things thought it none too wasteful
To hide the one called to bear forward amongst so many,
How important it is for that One to find soil and fulfill.
How important, for to bear
Is even to give purpose to all those whose call
Was to serve as decoy, that call among others yet unseen.
How much more hopeless their loss if the One is lost, too?
But what dignity their sacrifice if the one is planted?
What if you, my love, are that one seed?”

And though his words of encouragement
Cost his last farthing of pride,
The death and burial of it did plant that seed in the good soil,
And hope began to sprout again
--for both of them.