The people at the first house have mustard seed. They would gladly give some away.
Then Kisā Gotamī asks whether anyone in their family has died.
In a later Buddhist telling, she is looking for medicine for her dead child. The Buddha has asked for seed from a household untouched by death. Each door brings an offer of help. Each family also has someone to remember.
The difficulty is unbearable in its simplicity. There is seed. There are willing hands. There is no house that can meet the condition.
“Silent worlds bend to my will.”
The voice in the song fills the darkness with that claim. Around it are steel, armour, the force needed to keep going. It is possible to hear strength there, and also how much the strength is being asked to hold.
“Every drift feels always wrong.”
Beside Kisā Gotamī's story, those words acquire another weight. Grief can make the whole world seem incorrectly arranged. A familiar object remains where it was. The person who used it is gone.
Her search brings her into the lives of other people who have lost someone. Their answers cannot return her child. They make her loss part of a human world she had seemed to stand outside.
“Starlight in my eyes, the only light.”
The eye receives it. For a moment, the voice has stopped making its claim.