"If I were you," he said, "I would have children."

Unto this town there came a shabby stranger
(This town where hearts were hard and souls were blind)
With him there came a thin and thorny witch
And one white mare that shone like any silver.
They came here through bare gullies and waste water,
And were surprised to find a paradise.

Yes, in those days this was a paradise,
And little of this tale will sound much stranger;
In those lost days we poured out wine like water,
And yet with sorrow all our eyes were blind.
Though fat with grain and laden down with silver,
We feared the fate foretold us by a witch.

Two decades since, our king had hired this witch --
Nay, not to make this land a paradise;
To build his castle, for a price in silver,
A castle that would warn off any stranger.
And at her word it spiraled sheer and blind
Up from the cliffs that hang above the water.

Our king's vow proved as fickle as the water,
And he refused to pay the foreign witch
One-tenth the promised price, so raging blind
She cursed him with the fall of paradise;
And cursed us too, who would not help a stranger,
And darkened all our joys like tarnished silver.

Since then we had no pleasure of our silver,
Our crops, our herds, our perfect sun and water;
For doom, we knew, would come not from a stranger
But from among our own -- so said the witch.
A child of ours would drown our paradise;
A curse as cruel as our king, and as blind.

So on we went, as barren and as blind
As all the sea aswim with aching silver,
Until the day our poisoned paradise
Was beaten down by hooves that shone like water.
We lost the bitter wisdom of the witch
To our new king, a child of ours, a stranger.

No longer blind to tree and earth and water,
Drop silver in remembrance of the witch;
For paradise is sweeter than we knew, and stranger.