Bard: Bowed, or Banished - A wild turn of phrases.

At first, we heard the Dragon’s call The Silence we hear last of all The brave respond. Arise! Arise! How the vassals stand so brave Their sheltered lords they go to save. How confident the Dragon lies. She lies! The golden toad, ‘neath fiery stone Covers murder, flesh, and bone The haughty hide the crime in time.   And further, the further one goes back Along an ancient unmasked track Vermillion cloth upon her back, her back! One looks where eyes have not seen The woman in the woodland green, The shiftless, hapless, selfish she Another withstood a tower, what power! This unnamed and unknowing lass Looked into a leaded glass   Her mind let muddled thoughts go past An even deeper, darker curse An infinite stew of soundless voices The whirl of undiscovered choices Now amid, those two entwined The Mindful man in a vengeful act The Thoughtless girl in a darkened pact A different end for time’s swift shaft Into the future then did fly, did fly.   A changeless form forever fell, A shifting one who’d never tell And third, caught betwixt as well Incautious in both deed and word The Guardians nonetheless had heard The time must move undeterred From prefixed ‘til the end, the end In caprice incautious wind Aims for all the time to die, to die.   Scales for the Dragon, tests of faith For the Found Lost -her throne of grace And for the Ransomed one his Place For Torment, she stands, yet to face What echoes of the halls of time What shadows of a now lost clime Must mean to her in her chosen home Before her rest can at last come From the deepest friend, or those not known   A poet with his pen writes sounds he hears The shepherd, with keen eyes, draws shears By the pricking of my thumb something wicked this way comes A shepherd am I? or No!  a poet! How close the shear, or how far the rote The Players hear, and the song we know See, how far the archer bends the bow To strike the bullock’s anger'd eye?