🐝The Mead You Leave🐝

[Intro — instrumental, distant hurdy-gurdy drone, wind] [Verse 1 — Elspeth, from within the hive] I hear you at the threshold still, each winter, same as last, setting down the honeyed cup before the frost has passed. You call it for the living, and you call the other mine — but I have tasted every drop; I drink you through the vine. [Verse 2 — Elspeth] You think the stone divides us, that the dark is where I stay, but I am in the wax and comb, I never went away. Each swarm you watch above the field still answers to my name — I did not leave the orchard, love. I only changed my frame. [Chorus — Elspeth, warmer, building] So drink the mead, and leave the mead, and know I drink it too, the darkness never kept me — I kept a door for you. Gold is not a grave, my love, it's only patient light, waiting in the hollow stone to rise on your last night. [Bridge — sung low, ​Whispered Cornish, softer] An gwenen a dheu dhe'n tewl, ha dheu arta dhe'n golow. (The bee goes into the darkness, and comes again into the light.) Not just for me, love. That was always meant for you. [Verse 3 — Elspeth, shift to present tense, wider scope] Now broken things come find me, all the fallen and the lost, the nectar spoiled by grieving, and the wax undone by frost. I gather what the world discards and hold it in the dark, and every year at solstice, I send a little spark— [Final Chorus — full swell, choir] So drink the mead, and leave the mead, the door is always mine, the hive remembers everything the orchard left behind. Gold is not a grave, my love, it's only waiting light — and one day, when the frost is yours, I'll meet you in the night. [Outro — sparse, tender, fading] Leave the mead beside the hive. I'm not as far from you as the stone would have you think.