Deep in the hollow jail, sleeps Lord Randall   The mixed voices speak of bread and of sheets that were   Scarlet and blue are at his head   His heart like a cat drowns in a well      He thinks of all the girls he will not love   He thinks not of the future or the past   Blue lightning spikes the hills above the sea   Where Kasa's ship sets sail for other where      There stands the chief with gold on his hair   Two fingers thick each link of coiled ore   Speaks to his white skinned wife, she answers not   He hurls his question angry to the gulls      His wife strikes her mouth with a skull like sound   The bleeding image of her loss revolves above her mind   With every line in its design and accusing eye   That pierces Kasa's soul      The slaves row on beneath the dragon flag   His heart recoils recall his red haired son   Beneath the burning walls that he razed down      His wife and he speak not as wine is brought   A cup that seethes like the black blood of wolves   His wife's dagger is hidden in her dress   He drinks joyless to a dark sleep      The Jailer bangs the iron door   Lord Randall wakes, wakes in pain   He shakes his shackles in the beaten gloom   The blood of his wounds is hard as coal      The Jailer leads him out upon the blinding bright stair   He feels uneven turf beneath his feet   The priest intones, the sword falls on his neck   The pain is boiling cold      They lay him in the tomb at the break of day   They close the earthen door upon his clay   The birds are plucking worms from the ground      Their feathers gray as mist on a cloudy morn   Foresters burn branches from the sleeping trees   The white sun turns to stone      His mother lies in her labor nine days long   She called on Saint Bridget in her time   I looked out on the room of my birth   With hangings rich of many strange designs      Nobles stand with their wine cups in the room   Saluting me and she the King's queen   Already, I am forgetting who I am   Already, I've forgotten who I've been      My mother lifts me up to her huge soft breast   Her nipple like a berry both hard and brown   Her eyes look on me like waves of the sea   And with small lips the yellow milk I draw