The Egg in the Glassware (Box)

Lyrics

The window shows a gray morning.
London. The year is 1761.
November the fifteenth.
Seven o'clock.
The air in the workshop is fifty degrees.
John Harrison is sixty-seven years old.
He looks at the box on his bench.

It is a box of mahogany.
Twelve inches long, eight inches wide.
Built to hold the timekeeper.
The brass heart that must not break upon the water.
Lined with green felt, soft as moss.
To keep the egg safe in its glassware.

He lifts the lid. The brass hinges creak.
Just a little.
The smell of polish, wood and oil.
And the faint metallic tang.
Inside, the chronometer. Ticking.
A quiet machine life.
The apprentice, whose name is lost, polished it yesterday.
He is not in the records at Cambridge University.

The box is built larger than it needs to be.
Dava Sobel wrote about this in her book in 1995.
It is a purposeful trick.
Padding fills the empty space to confuse a thief.
To make them think it holds something less valuable.
A stale biscuit on a tin plate.
A simple box for simple things.

It is a box of mahogany.
Twelve inches long, eight inches wide.
Built to hold the timekeeper.
The brass heart that must not break upon the water.
Lined with green felt, soft as moss.
To keep the egg safe in its glassware.

The box was carried to the HMS Deptford.
It was secured in the captain's cabin.
It crossed the sea. It held the time. It found the longitude.
After many years of labor and study.
It did its job.
It is just a box.