*Note- verse is by W.B. Yeats
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
“Come away, come away.”
Silky whispers slide smoothly into his ears as we silently entice him into a world without these leaky roofs, muddy floors, and restless squeaks of rodents that are as hungry as he is. It is our job to salvage the spirit encased in this dying child’s body. He longs to follow the sounds of our voices, but brittle bones hold him down like weights, anchoring him to the ground, where he drowns in miserable oxygen. The poor soul. But he will only need to suffer a little while longer. His skin shivers more from the damp than the cold. Beside him is the petrified, hollowed face of an old, young woman whose stony gray eyes do not have the conviction to be heartbroken but are not yet glazed enough to be dead. Through her half-dried lips we hear a half-hearted plea.
“Hold on baby.” Her voice is broken, cracked, parched. She is starving for a miracle. “Please.”
Her last syllable implores him to stay, but it is a question. And she already knows the answer. On her breath rests a sorrow too ineffably deep for him to comprehend. Despite her words, we know, and she does too somewhere in her soul, that it is best that we take him away. Her dry, sunken eyes sparkle with the glint of a pitiful attempt to cry as his eyes widen, striving to catch the light one last time, though it is too hard for him to focus them. They have been pointed out the window to look out upon the faeries’ world. We saw him watching us, and we have come to take him. To him, now, the grass is gray and the pond nearby nothing but murky blackness. Yet even still he can see there is something in the way the raindrops patter in rhythm on the ground, dancing as they bounce off the surface of the pond and humming lightly as they run down the hillside into a newborn stream. The steady fall of rainwater is the beat, the occasional whistle of the wind the melody. We are dancing, singing, rejoicing; raindrops, raining, racing, falling, flickering, flittering, flying. Our wings tickle his nose as we waltz through the glassless window. There is little contrast now between the cold water our feet fling around the windowsill and his icy wet skin.
“Come away, come away.”
We breathe him away, and soon he is running with us down the hillside, into the pond where we splash around. Around us, bright berries shine life into his cold, glowing body. He does not need to pick them. That they are there is enough. Hand in hand with the child, we dance around the pond and sing. Vivacious feelings that he has never felt so vibrantly wrap around him as our happy people embrace him. And our singing turns into the soothing hush of the wind as it whistles through the rolling hills. Our wings silently bat the air as we lift him into eternal ecstasy, and together we vanish from the world.
Back in his old home a tear breaks through a crack in a dark, sunken eye. An old, young woman brings herself to stand because there is nothing left where she was sitting. Nothing, but a withered pile of broken, brittle bones and sightless, empty eyes. But out of those eyes has whisked a spirit that can now be seen faintly, when the sunbeams shine just right, dancing with the faeries out in the rolling, evergreen hillsides of Ireland.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
