Skald's Confession (version 2)

Intro

Hall's gone quiet, embers chewing on the log

Mead cup empty, moon hung low behind the fog

They call me keeper of the names the wind erased

I keep the fire lit and burn my own face

Verse

Born third son, no land, no plate to call my own

Learned the harp before I learned to lift a stone

Chief said sing for supper, boy, or starve out in the snow

So I traded truth for verses no one asked to know

Watched the raiders burn my uncle's roof to ember

Wrote it pretty for the king, made him easy to remember

Every scar I gave a metaphor, a shield, a crown

Turned the widow's scream into a sound that won renown

Coin for kennings, silver for the way I bend a fact

Told the hall he died a hero, left the coward part intact

I was there behind the shieldwall, further back than most

Lived because I ducked, then I sang the dead like ghosts

Fire ate the longhouse, I stood close enough to thaw

Wrote the flames as glory, called the ash a kind of law

Thirty winters singing debts I never meant to owe

Every name I saved is a name I let go

Chorus

I carved their names in smoke so mine could last

Ash on my tongue, that's the toll of the past

I lit the fire, warmed my hands in the blaze

Every legend's a debt some skald never pays

Verse

Twenty years past, my hands don't hold the harp so steady

Younger skald in the hall now, hungry, sharp, and ready

He sings my songs back polished, adds a verse of his own

Calls it homage, calls me father of the throne

But the throne was borrowed, built on borrowed bone and breath

Every ballad that I wrote was somebody's private death

Old woman came to me last spring, said you sang my son

Said you made him brave, but brave was never how he'd run

I told her sorry's not a coin that spends the same as gold

She