Before I found the yellow wood,

I fell in with the Sisterhood.

The silent sirens of these coasts

were mortal once but now are ghosts.

They lost their way one winter night

when they misread the Cape Spear light,

the flash of blue that comes and goes

at intervals that no one knows.

Unschooled in what the lost must do,

they sang and lost their voices, too.

Although the sirens could not sing,

they watched and witnessed everything.

They could not sing but they could write—

they wrote their songs night after night

until they solved, in their last song,

the Mystery of Right and Wrong.

The song they wrote no one has heard—

they taught it to me word by word.

I know it well but no one who

can sing the way that sirens do.

—Rachel van Hout, The Arelliad