The wise bird will plant trees
with a mind to nests they will never see built.
They should not despair, then,
at having no songs sung of them in times to come.
For one day each young breath will sing in celebration
that, once, they lived at all.
We like to think so
our traditions encourage this
but doubt lingers still
time is infinite
Songs live longer than Empires,
And Empires live longer than men.
Many remain to keep the flame of the dead...
May many then sing
the song of our people
is that an echo?
The shipwreck is a stern portent
and harbours many a morbid event
(We pray the Saiiban never see
such terrible calamity)
Yet for all we know
some poor lost flock yet now sings
on some doomed dead rock
Not all failures are the fault of leaders
Subordinates can fail too
In the end, we are all flawed beings
Regardless of species
Such is the fruit of Eden's demise
We know of the song of Eden's fruit
But believe that to know is no doom
as such we find its lesson moot
And grab what we can by the plume
(What's Saiiban religion like, by the way?)
It's an interesting question. Mechanically, they are fanatic materialists, so some might be tempted to say "None", but I don't necessarily hold to that view.
I mean, it's likely that Saiiban culture has an unusually high number of atheists compared to say, humans, but religion is as much a social structure as a system of belief, and its interwoven with culture. As such, I believe that there are active and meaningful religious traditions within the Saiiban culture.
I tend to imagine that the average Saiiban is ambivalent about the idea of an afterlife, but strongly believes, similar to Jewish traditions, that what matters is their actions and deeds in the life they have. There is also an emphasis on communalism in the Saiiban culture that tends to emphasize the rights of the group as a whole rather than the rights of the individual: i.e a belief in the overall good of the flock vs the good of any one specific bird. Although, like any group of individual sapients, I imagine you'll find infinite varieties of personalities and attitudes.
In the poem you replied to, I was described an imagined religious/cultural tradition where a dead Saiiban was buried along with a seed for a planted tree. I do imagine Saiiban evolved in medium to heavy woods, and so its a sort of nod back to their roots as a people. Likewise, when a Saiiban dies I imagined their feathers are removed and then burned, so that they may fly into the sky one last time, forever.
