Amid melted-down candles and twilight-time prayers
Among trophies of war and the peace-fire's glow
Lived the children of books, far from battle's despairs
Crushed by crises too tiny for grown men to know

They were vexed by their age
By their world, by their fate —
And we fought to the edge
Of unbearable hate
But our mothers would patch
Every tear, every hole
While we drank every batch
Of the lines that made soul

Sweaty hair on our brows, and the thrill in our guts
Words would sting us with sweetness, as sharp as a blade
And the scent of the fight, like a wind filled with guts
Blew from yellowed old pages where stories were laid

We, who’d never known war
Tried to grasp, tried to feel
Why the battle-cries roar
Why the war-chariots wheel;
What the order commands
What a border might mean —
And the song of the land
Where the steel had once been
In the stews of the past — full of chaos and flame —
We found food for our minds in the tales of the dead
And in games we assigned every coward a name
Every traitor and Judas received what we said

We would chase every trace
Of the villainous men
And we swore to embrace
All the heroines then
And while loving our kin
With a boyish delight
We would cast ourselves in
As the heroes of fight

But we cannot escape into dream-worlds too far —
Fun is brief, while the pain in the world always grows
Try and prise the dead hands that still cling to the spar
Take the weapon they gripped, feel the weight of their blows

Dare to fight, sword in hand
While it’s still burning warm
Put on armor and stand —
Face the cold of the storm!
Find your truth in the cost
In the fear, in the flame —
Are you hero, or lost?
Are you worthy of name?
When your comrade falls near, and your scream breaks the air
And your soul is laid bare by the grief, raw and wild —
When you feel that it should have been you lying there
And you’re skinned by the death of another man’s child —

You will know, you will see
You will find and compare
By the grin of the steel —
That’s death smiling there
Look at evil and lies —
See how brutal they are!
And behind them, the cries
And the coffin, and spar…

If you’ve never once torn
Off a piece of raw meat
If you watched with your scorn
From a comfortable seat
If you never stepped in
To strike down what was wrong —
Then your life was a sin —
You’ve been nothing all along!

But if, cutting your path with your father’s old blade
You have tasted the cost and the blood in the flame
If the truth of the fight in your soul has been laid —
Then you read all the right books and earned your own name!