Think of a country
as a woman.

When it casts a grey cloak about you for to hold and hum into,
When its air holds the sparkle of a cleansing breath,
When its land cradles you, its heartbeat thrumming up through your heels,
When its colours are soft and no voice calls men to war
- that country could not be a man.

Doriath was Yavanna herself.
Elu and Melian saw to that.
Not even the coming of the Sun and Moon
caused harshness to scratch a single skin.
The trees sang and taught us gently.
The Noldor and the orcs were mapping the land outside,
and they mocked us, challenged us;
But we had mapped the stars.

We sang before we wrote, wrote before we hated.
Doriath was the soul of an emerald.

To swim in the deeps of Menegroth and know
the earth's whims by Melian's pulse,

To be not Elu, but near him, as he pierced
the frontiers of his skin with divinity,
a living jewel, lover of the limitless,
a law unto himself, sharp as a meteor shower,

To walk in Neldoreth, where magic wove
and grew strong in dark, a self-guiding poem,

To be alive and see Luthien
dance as God might sing -

Think of this as Doriath.

We were wild, unpredictable,
a nation of gods and minstrels,
We fought, drank, laughed, thrilled,
we worshipped, we were volatile.
We were innocent, for that age of amber.

We had the beauty of individual, separate notes of sound,
long before the Noldor had a purpose
and long after they nursed it into obsession.

To us, things were never one seamless whole.
Inside our eggshell, we gleamed, each in our own right,
loved the music,
set the rest free.