The Letter You Wrote From the Trench (Alfred Wegener)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
You were a meteorologist
in a century
that did not yet think
weather was important enough
to send a man
to Greenland four times for,
and you went
to Greenland
four times anyway
because the part of you
that needed to know
how the air over the ice
behaved
was older
than the part of you
that needed
to come home.

[Verse 2]
You looked at a map
of the Atlantic
when you were thirty
and you saw
what every schoolchild
who has ever looked
at a map of the Atlantic
has seen,
and you said
*the continents move*
in a room
full of geologists
who told you
they did not move
and could not move
and asked you
to please
go back
to your barometer.

[Chorus]
You wrote the book anyway.
You wrote it
in a field hospital
in nineteen fifteen
recovering
from a bullet
through your neck,
and the geologists
laughed for forty years
and the continents
kept moving
the whole time
without consulting
the geologists
or the bullet
or the room
or the book,
and the book
turned out
to be right.

[Verse 3]
You went back
to Greenland
on your fiftieth birthday
because the supplies
were not going to last
the winter
for the men
who had come there
for you,
and you got on the sledge
and went into the snow
the way a man goes
when he can already see
how the chapter ends
and the chapter
is not the point.

[Outro]
The continents
are still moving
under the floor
of every house
the geologists
ever lived in.
You were right.
You did not need
to live to see it.
You already knew.

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