To My Cher'st, Poetry by Character Amel, Okal Rel Universe

introduction

This poem dates from the early period of Amel's tenure as Liege Dem'Vrel, possibly inspired by his abortive courtship of Luthan, and is among the poetry collected from courtesan circles where Amel was always most free about sharing his work. It was originally written in Golden Age Demoran Dialect.

Amel, in this translation, dreams of his own cher'st as inaccessible to him in this life, but perhaps not the future or the past, imagining he senses her only in the timeless phase of space flight - a typical Gelack metaphysical device.

In its original Gelack, the poem is an example of a Demoran form which both unites and distinguishes between an ideal and its manifestation, ideally without belittling either. Amel employs it to juxtapose his own cher'st, in the 'concrete role', with the ideal of cher'stan love. Golden Age Demoran Dialect being better equipped for allusion than English, such subtleties survive - in the translation - only in the final stanza where the poet equates his belief in true love with cher'stan love as a concept. The suggestion which follows, that lesser loves might be meaningful substitutes, is a muddying of the form that is pure Amel.

	To My Cher'st	music and vocal by Jennifer Lott
	I know you would laugh at my excesses if we met each other, whole, some life; and kiss my griefs to butterflies. I know you are clean where you are. When I mourn my virgin hopes you flash silver as a missed star; neither rushing up nor falling past my arc of flight I know you between nows. Doing better without me than I can you look up from whoever you are to smile at my living ghost Golden memory and Silver promise. Today bears the shield of my yesterdays before my eyes I could not recognize you if you hailed me in a corridor, ablaze in joy. I would want too much anyhow. We can unite instead in strangers' arms, each time you laugh, each time I love, and live in all the cher'stan who've had better luck.

commentary

Okal Rel holds that some souls are eternally in search of one another through repeated incarnations, and incomplete without the other's presence. Such soul-lovers, known as cher'stan, are either rare or very common, depending on interpretation, but all agree they are rarely alive at the same time and place.

Cher (pol case) and cher'st (rel case) entered the Gelack language during the Demoran Golden age, featured in literature as a favorite excuse for a heroine's infidelity to her husband. Usage of the pol form, cher (originally from Lorel French), waned in the following centuries, and the cher'stan relationship also took hold in Vrellish consciousness where it became the one forgivable excuse for exclusive pair-bonding.

Demoran Demish hold cher'stan in the ultimate esteem, and presume such bonds are natural to members of their greatest families. Court Demish readily profess belief in cher'stan but are apt to demand impossible proof of a soul-pairing should it cause dynastic inconvenience. Vrellish pooh pooh cher'stan claims, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, but will respect whatever they can be convinced to be a genuine case.

Page last updated: 11-Oct-2003

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