(The reciter speaks the strophes; the gathering answers the refrain. The voice rises at the Phoenix and slows at the Sound of Feeling.) Listen, you who are awake. Listen, for the star is dying, and none are left to tell it now but we who learned, at last, the telling. The Redstar is dying — it was always so. Hold the breath of the Titans. Let the telling go. — I. The Architects — Before the gods, the Makers stood, who hung the worlds and lit the day; but a candle lit is a candle spent, and they read their ending in the clay. They would not be saved. They chose to become: they screamed themselves to canyon and to flare — the gravity, the silence, and the sun, the tomb they built, and the dead that linger there. The Redstar is dying — it was always so. Hold the breath of the Titans. Let the telling go. — II. The Hardening — The first gods wept, for the first gods felt, and feeling, the dying star burned away; so the rest cut the softness out of themselves and grew into gears that could not pray. Ten thousand years of blood and the thumping press, they tore out mercy, and hope, and shame, till nothing remained that could mourn or bless, and a soul, in the new gods, was a word for blame. The Redstar is dying — it was always so. Hold the breath of the Titans. Let the telling go. — III. The Gears — Zeus in the storm with his plasma crown, the Gorgon humming her killing song, Hera weaving the war-chord down, the twins at their quarrel all night long; Hades counting the ghosts of the slain, Athena’s web upon every world, Ares in love with the rot and the pain — and over them all, one ember curled. — IV. The Phoenix — (the voice rises) Pegasus, born of the burning crown, the Phoenix that swims where the solar winds blow; no god could ride it, no god strike it down — they named it hope, and they let it go. The Redstar is dying — it was always so. Hold the breath of the Titans. Let the telling go. — V. The Cradle and the Stranger — Down in the dark where the new gods grow, the vats and the Amazons turned the wheel, till a rift tore open, and out of the glow came a stranger bearing a box, and a seal. She set it down and she walked away, and the box breathed out an unmade sound; and the cold machines could not parse the day, and the silence broke, and the gods came round. — VI. The Sound of Feeling — (the voice slows) What rose was the thing they had burned to keep out: the sound of feeling, the cry, the ache — the same note the Makers had screamed in their doubt, struck soft this time, for the children’s sake. — Coda — Now the new gods wake to the weight of the light, and they mourn the embers as they cool below; but they lift their faces when the star burns bright, and they look for the Phoenix — and they will not let go. The Redstar is dying — it was always so. We breathe the breath of the Titans — and we do not look away.
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