Whispers of the past, haunting me forever,
dancing in my very veins, speaking to me of days long gone, and heroes long dead.
A memory, but not my own.
Names, living only in distant memories of my people,
and fragments, some of them surviving in surnames.
Visions of places that don’t exist anymore.
Faces and voices of friends and kin,
only just beyond my sight and hearing.
Skills long untapped, in my hands,
itching to be used again.
Songs bring back some glimpse of a memory, oh yes, a memory,
a place where I once was, and yet I was never there, except in dreams.
But I was there, and yet I was not.
An enigma, something that cannot be answered by man’s fallible superstitions,
for I was not born thrice, nor even twice. I was born once, as is appointed for man.
And yet, parts of me are much older than my mortal frame.
Sometimes I can almost see their faces: Arthur, Emrys, Myrddin, Gwaine, Gwlachavad,
Peredur, Kentigern, Aedan, Eogan…
How much of what I know of them is real? How much is a fantasy,
a figment of a writer’s imagination?
If ever I met any of these men, would I recognize them? Would I see them as my kinsmen?
Sometimes it is almost as if their memories are my own.
I have mourned and run with Myrddin
as he fled the battle of Arderydd,
and I have rejoiced with tears in my eyes
as Arthur and his knights succeeded
in uniting Albion in a glorious age of freedom, liberty, justice, and truth.
Albion… my home.
The home I long for with tears,
the home I have never seen with mortal eyes,
and the home that lives now only in the hearts of her sons and daughters
who care enough to remember her.
Will we ever return to Albion?
Will we ever return to that glorious land of light, freedom, truth, liberty?
That beautiful land where the One True God is worshipped and obeyed,
where true beauty and goodness are loved and cherished?
This was the dream of the bard, Taliesin, many ages ago in Britannia,
but now that dream is reborn in me, a dreamer,
more than a thousand years younger.